Using games to investigate sense of agency and attribution of responsibility

Abstract

Attribution of responsibility and sense of agency are key topics raised by situations in which control is shared between man and machine. For example, when a failure occurs in a robotic surgery, causing permanent injuries to a patient, who should be blamed? In order to investigate how individuals attribute responsibility and how they perceive agency, a game was used as a playful research tool. The assumption is that a game may lead the player to behave more naturally, forgetting he is in a conducted experiment. This paper presents the Shared Ball game, designed to simulate a situation of shared control. It was hypothesised that users would display a self servicing bias behaviour when playing the game. After conducting an experiment, the hypothesis showed to be consistent. Knowledge acquired in this experiment can be beneficial to the construction of safer and more enjoyable technology, since that all possible abnormal conditions can never be fully predicted, and use of adaptive and autonomous technology has to be accompanied by a debate on moral responsibility and ethical rules.