Influence of Robophobia on Decision Making in a Court Scenario

Abstract

This study focuses on the use of robotic advisers on the jury's ability to make a decision on the length of criminal sentences in a court scenario. Based on a preliminary study(Hayashi & Wakabayashi, 2017), we further investigated a human's negative feelings toward robots, such as the 'robophobia'; it was suggested that individuals with a higher degree of robophobia may not comply with the robot's suggestions. We conducted a laboratory experiment using a simple jury decision making task, where a robot suggested the length of time as punishment for a particular crime. We discovered whether the participants would make a decision based on the robot's suggestion and examined the correlations between the length of sentence chosen by the participants and their degree of robophobia. Results do not show statistical significance; however, we found that there is a possibility that participants comply with robots when they feel less negatively towards the robot.