James C. Walliser

Arizona State University, George Mason University

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

James C. Walliser is a leading voice in the emerging field of human-robot interaction, with a specific focus on the ethics of artificial intelligence. His research explores a critical question for our time: under what conditions do humans trust the moral judgments of machines? Walliser’s most influential work, “Trusting the Moral Judgments of a Robot” (2023, 13 citations), investigates how factors like perceived moral competence and humanlikeness—specifically in a GPT-3 enabled AI—shape our willingness to cede moral authority to non-human agents. This foundational study has opened a vital dialogue on the psychological and ethical dimensions of AI-assisted decision-making. He has extended this line of inquiry in his 2025 paper on GenAI-enabled ethical robot advisors (4 citations), examining how large-language models can navigate moral queries. Earlier in his career, Walliser contributed to the foundations of social robotics by studying how perspective-taking toward robots can reduce implicit biases (2015, 3 citations). By bridging moral philosophy, social cognition, and cutting-edge AI, Walliser’s work is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of trustworthy, ethically-aligned autonomous systems.