When are artificial intelligence versus human agents faulted for wrongdoing? Moral attributions after individual and joint decisions

ABSTRACT

Artificial intelligence (AI) agents make decisions that affect individuals and society which can produce outcomes traditionally considered moral violations if performed by humans. Do people attribute the same moral permissibility and fault to AIs and humans when each produces the same moral violation outcome? Additionally, how do people attribute morality when the AI and human are jointly making the decision which produces that violation? We investigate these questions with an experiment that manipulates written descriptions of four real-world scenarios where, originally, a violation outcome was produced by an AI. Our decision-making structures include individual decision-making – either AIs or humans – and joint decision-making – either humans monitoring AIs or AIs recommending to humans. We find that the decision-making structure has little effect on morally faulting AIs, but that humans who monitor AIs are faulted less than solo humans and humans receiving recommendations. Furthermore, people attribute more permission and less fault to AIs compared to humans for the violation in both joint decision-making structures. The blame for joint AI-human wrongdoing suggests the potential for strategic scapegoating of AIs for human moral failings and the need for future research on AI-human teams.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• attributions
• algorithms
• morality
• decision-making

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Daniel B. Shank is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological Science specializing in the area of social psychology. He obtained a BA in Computer Science from Harding University, and from the University of Georgia he received an MS in Artificial Intelligence and an MA and PhD in Sociology. He served in two postdoctoral research fellowships before coming to Missouri S&T, the first in sociology at the University of Alabama Birmingham and the second in psychology at the University of Melbourne (Australia). His research interests include psychological perception and social interaction with nonhumans including artificial intelligence, other technologies, consumer products, and groups of people. He studies perceptions of morality, attributions of mind, affective impressions, and emotional and behavioral reactions and how these processes differ between human–human interaction and human–nonhuman or human–technology interaction.

Alyssa DeSanti has her Bachelor's in Psychology and Master's in Industrial Organizational Psychology from Missouri S&T. Her concentration was in Human Computer Interaction and that is where her passion lies. She is pursuing a career in User Experience Research. She has been published in Computers in Human behavior and her works have been presented at various conferences such as the Psychology of Technology, American Sociological Association conference, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

Timothy Maninger is an undergraduate student at Missouri S&T where he is studying Psychology. He is also the Editor in Chief of the campus newspaper, The Missouri Miner. His proposal for an undergraduate research project was recently approved, and will be completed over the coming school year. His research interests include: the societal implications of automation and AI, the formation and cessation of prejudice and opinion polarization, and the possibility of low cost automated psychotherapy.