An investigation was conducted into how people judge moral wrongness in a robot and in its designers and owners regarding the consequence of the robot's behaviors in the trolley problem and into how people judge moral wrongness in a human and the employers of the human. As a result, the participants seemed to apply the same moral norm to the human and robot, while they applied a different moral norm to the employers of the human and designers/owners of the robot; that is, the designers/owners of the robot received higher rates of moral wrongness compared with the employers of the human even though the human and the robot behaved the same. Moreover, this result suggests that moral wrongness would be assigned to all three (robot, designers, owners) when the robot takes an action, while it would blur among them when it did not. The results of these investigations will contribute toward the new research field of "moral HRI," which can provide a concrete guide for future robotic design.
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