Aikaterina Manoli

Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences

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About

Aikaterina Manoli is a leading voice in the emerging field of human-AI moral psychology, exploring how people assign responsibility and blame to artificial agents. Her most influential work, "The AI Double Standard: Humans Judge All AIs for the Actions of One" (2025), has already garnered 8 citations, revealing a critical cognitive bias: when one AI system causes harm, humans unfairly generalize that blame to all other AIs—a phenomenon she terms "moral spillover." This research demonstrates that unlike humans, who are judged individually, AI systems face collective condemnation, creating a double standard that could shape public policy and trust in technology. Her 2024 preprint of the same study laid the groundwork for this insight, showing that people perceive AI as a monolithic moral agent rather than a collection of distinct systems. Manoli’s work is essential for understanding how societal attitudes toward AI evolve, with profound implications for developers, regulators, and ethicists. By exposing this bias, she challenges us to rethink accountability in an age of proliferating intelligent machines.