Hey Robot, the Mind Is Not Enough to Join the Moral Community! The Effect of Assigning a Mind and a Soul to a Humanoid Robot on Its Moral Status

Abstract

Current research explored the link between beliefs about the mind, the soul, and the moral status (MS) of humanoid robot (HR). Determining the conditions for the assignment of MS to artificially intelligent agents is important from the point of view of their inclusion in the moral community. The indication of the role of beliefs about the mind and the soul is consistent with the tendency to distinguish these two incorporeal entities observed in folk psychology. In an online study, participants (N = 223), who believed in the existence of the mind and the soul, assessed the MS of the HR Sophia and assigned attributes to it; based on this, two dimensions of the mind perception (MP) were distinguished: Experience and Agency. As expected, we found that the participants attributed the mind more than the soul to the robot, and these projections significantly affected the MS of the robot. Path analysis revealed that the dimensions of MP acted as a mediator in the mind-MS relationship, while the soul-MS relationship was direct. The analysis of the obtained results leads to a more general conclusion that the soul attribution is a diverse and parallel condition to the mind attribution in individuals.