Sanna Rauhala
Papers
2
Total Citations
38
H-Index
2
About
Sanna Rauhala’s research lies at the vital intersection of moral psychology, human-robot interaction, and healthcare ethics, with a particular focus on how people perceive the decision-making of nursing robots in ethically charged situations. Her major contributions center on exploring public preferences for robot behavior in dilemmas involving patient autonomy, a domain where artificial intelligences are increasingly deployed but remain poorly understood from a moral standpoint. In her most-cited work, “Moral psychology of nursing robots” (2022, 32 citations), Rauhala conducted an anthropological field study and four experiments involving over 2,000 participants, revealing that humans strongly dislike robots that violate patient autonomy, yet paradoxically approve of robots that disobey direct orders when doing so serves a patient’s best interests. This nuanced finding challenges simplistic views of machine ethics and has significant implications for the design of autonomous systems in care settings. Her earlier paper on the same theme (2019, 6 citations) laid the groundwork for this inquiry. Rauhala’s work is notable for its empirical rigor and real-world relevance, offering essential guidance for engineers, ethicists, and policymakers navigating the future of robotic caregiving.
Research Focus
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Top Papers
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