The present project aimed to study how people make moral judgment for human versus robot behaviors. Ten transgression scenarios were presented to the participants with either a human or a robot as the perpetrator or the victim. Results showed that most of the transgressions were perceived as less immoral when it was acted on a robot than on a human. Moral judgments for human behaviors were more intuitive and emotion based. Moral judgments for robot behaviors involve both intuition and cognitive reasoning. Possible psychological causes were discussed.

Effective communication between a person and a robot may depend on whether there exists a common ground of understanding between the two. In two experiments modelled after human-human studies we examined how people form a mental model of a robot’s factual knowledge. Participants estimated the robot’s knowledge by extrapolating from their own knowledge and from information about the robot’s origin and language. These results suggest that designers of humanoid robots must attend not only to the social cues that robots emit but also to the information people use to create mental models of a robot.