We present two experiments comparing moral judgments of robots among Japanese and U.S. participants. The experiments assess multiple ways in which cross-cultural differences in moral evaluations may emerge: in the willingness to treat robots as moral agents; the norms that are imposed on robots' behaviors; and the degree of blame that accrues to them when they violate the imposed norms. Even though Japanese and U.S. participants differ to some extent in their treatment of robots as moral agents and in the particular norms they impose on them, the two cultures show parallel patterns of greater blame for robots who fail to intervene in moral dilemmas.
@inproceedings{komatsuetal21,
title={Blaming the Reluctant Robot: Parallel Blame Judgments for Robots in Moral Dilemmas across U.S. and Japan},
author={Takanori Komatsu and Bertram F. Malle and Matthias Scheutz},
year={2021},
booktitle={International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction},
pages={63--72}
url={https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/komatsuetal21.pdf}
}