Authors
Terran Mott and Cailyn Smith and Aaron Fanganello and Tom Williams
Venue
International Journal of Social Robotics
Publication Year
2025
When robots are given unethical commands, they must respond in effective, yet appropriate ways.
In previous work, Mott presented experimental evidence arguing that robots must use bounded proportionality when responding to norm violations, using only a subset of human sociolinguistic strategies when generating proportional responses. Yet Mott's insights were drawn from a small group of university students, and leveraged only quantitative results. In this work we thus perform a mixed-methods replication of Mott's work with a large, diverse set of online participants (n=200). Our results not only support Mott's findings, but provide stronger and clearer evidence thereof. Moreover, our qualitative results highlight key technical, sociotechnical, and power-laden concerns held by participants that reveal important insights for the future design and deployment of morally competent robots.
