Will People Morally Crack Under the Authority of a Famous Wicked Robot?

Abstract

Authority and obedience are key regulatory elements in a society. Robots are becoming important part of our world, and are starting to interact in domains in which authority is an important aspect, as healthcare, teaching or law enforcement. Yet, there is little research on how people behave when robots show authority. In particular, although extensive investigations have been carried out on how authority can circumvent people's morality with experiments such as Milgram's or Stanford Prison, almost no research evaluated the effect of robots pushing the limits of people's own morality. This experiment tries to study this aspect by using a robot (geminoid) with the appearance, and thus authority of a famous person, and by pushing the boundaries asking morally controversial requests. The results show that, even though most people hesitate and recognize the requests as socially inappropriate, they obey to robots with authority. This suggests that the authority of the robot can push people to perform tasks usually considered as inappropriate.