skip to main content
10.1145/1357054.1357113acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageschiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Children attribute moral standing to a personified agent

Published: 06 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes the results of a study conducted to answer two questions: (1) Do children generalize their understanding of distinctions between conventional and moral violations in human-human interactions to human-agent interactions? and (2) Does the agent's ability to make claims to its own moral standing influence children's judgments? A two condition, between- and within-subjects study was conducted in which 60 eight and nine year-old children interacted with a personified agent and observed a researcher interacting with the same agent. A semi-structured interview was conducted to investigate the children's judgments and reasoning about the observed interactions as well as hypothetical human-human interactions. Results suggest that children do distinguish between conventional and moral violations in human-agent interactions and that the ability of the agent to express harm and make claims to its own rights significantly increases children's likelihood of identifying an act against the agent as a moral violation.

References

[1]
Bakeman, R. & Gottman, J. M. (1997). Observing Interaction: An Introduction to Sequential Analysis. NY: Cambridge University Press.
[2]
Cassell, J. (2000). Embodied Conversational Agents. The MIT Press.
[3]
Fleiss, J. L., Levin, B., & Paik, M. C. (2003). Statistical Methods for Rates and Proportions, 3rd Ed. Hoboken: John Wiley and Son
[4]
Fong, T., Nourbakhsh, I., & Dautenhahn, K. (2003). A survey of socially interactive robots. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 42(3-4), 143--166.
[5]
Freier, N. G. (2007). Children Distinguish Conventional from Moral Violations in Interactions with a Personified Agent. Dissertation Manuscript. The Information School, University of Washington.
[6]
Friedman, B. (Ed.) (1997). Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
[7]
Friedman, B., Kahn, P. H., Jr., & Borning, A. (2006). Value Sensitive Design and information systems. In P. Zhang & D. Galletta (eds.), Human-Computer Interaction in Management Information Systems: Foundations. (pp. 348--372). Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
[8]
Friedman, B., Kahn, P. H., Jr., & Hagman, J. (2003). Hardware companions? -- What online AIBO discussion forums reveal about the human-robotic relationship. Proceedings of the ACM 2003 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '03). (pp. 273--280). New York: Association for Computing Machinery.
[9]
Gelman, S. A. & Opfer, J. E. (2002) Development of the animate-inanimate distinction. In Goswami, U. (Ed.) Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
[10]
Isbister, K. (2006). Better Game Characters by Design: A Psychological Approach. Boston: Morgan Kaufmann.
[11]
Kahn, P. H., Jr. (1999). The Human Relationship with Nature: Development and Culture. MIT Press.
[12]
Kahn, P. H., Jr., Friedman, B., Perez-Granados, D., & Freier, N. G. (2006). Robotic pets in the lives of preschool children. Interaction Studies, 7(3), 405--436.
[13]
Killen M., Lee-Kim, J., McGlothlin, H., & Stangor, C. (2002). How children and adolescents evaluate gender and racial exclusion. Monographs for the Society for Research in Child Development (Serial No. 271), 67(4). Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
[14]
Landis, J. R. & Koch, G. G. (1977). The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics, 33(1), 159--174.
[15]
Lester, J., Converse, S., et al. (1997). The persona effect: Affective impact of animated pedagogical agents. CHI '97: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (pp. 359--366). ACM.
[16]
Nass, C. & Brave, S. (2005). Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship. Cambridge: MIT Press.
[17]
Nass, C., Moon, Y., Morkes, J., Kim, E. Y., & Fogg, B. J. (1997). Computers are social actors: A review of current research. In B. Friedman (Ed.). (1997). Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology (pp. 137--162). Stanford, CA: CSLI.
[18]
Nissenbaum, H. (1996) Accountability in a computerized society. Science and Engineering Ethics 2, 25--42.
[19]
Piaget, J. (1983). Piaget's theory. In W. Kessen (Ed.), P. H. Mussen (Series Ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology: Vol. 1. History, Theory, and Methods (4th ed., pp. 103--128). New York: Wiley.
[20]
Reeves, B. & Nass, C. (1996). The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media like Real People and Places. The Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications.
[21]
Smetana, J. (2006). Social-cognitive domain theory: Consistencies and variations in children's moral judgments. In M. Killen & J. Smetana (Eds.), Handbook of Moral Development. (pp. 119--154). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
[22]
Turiel. E., & Davidson, P. (1986). Heterogeneity, inconsistency, and asynchrony in the development of cognitive structures. In I. Levin, (Ed.). Stage & Structure: Reopening the Debate. (pp. 106--143). Ablex, Norwood, N.J.
[23]
Wiener, N. (1950). The Human Use of Human Beings. Boston: Da Copa Press.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Challenges in Value-Sensitive AI Design: Insights from AI Practitioner InterviewsInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2024.2439021(1-18)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2024
  • (2024)Bias at Play: Investigating Sensitization and Desensitization to Diversity and Inclusion via Interactions with BotsComputers in Human Behavior Reports10.1016/j.chbr.2024.100493(100493)Online publication date: Sep-2024
  • (2024)AI ethics unwrapped: an empirical investigation of ethical principles in collaborative ideation processesAI and Ethics10.1007/s43681-024-00638-9Online publication date: 27-Dec-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Children attribute moral standing to a personified agent

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2008
    1870 pages
    ISBN:9781605580111
    DOI:10.1145/1357054
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 06 April 2008

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. children
    2. moral development
    3. personified software agent
    4. social responses to computing
    5. user-centered design
    6. value sensitive design

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    CHI '08
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    CHI '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 157 of 714 submissions, 22%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

    Upcoming Conference

    CHI 2025
    ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 26 - May 1, 2025
    Yokohama , Japan

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)15
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 05 Jan 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Challenges in Value-Sensitive AI Design: Insights from AI Practitioner InterviewsInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2024.2439021(1-18)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2024
    • (2024)Bias at Play: Investigating Sensitization and Desensitization to Diversity and Inclusion via Interactions with BotsComputers in Human Behavior Reports10.1016/j.chbr.2024.100493(100493)Online publication date: Sep-2024
    • (2024)AI ethics unwrapped: an empirical investigation of ethical principles in collaborative ideation processesAI and Ethics10.1007/s43681-024-00638-9Online publication date: 27-Dec-2024
    • (2023)Moral Transparency as a Mitigator of Moral Bias in Conversational User InterfacesProceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces10.1145/3571884.3603752(1-6)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
    • (2022)A value sensitive design approach for designing AI-based worker assistance systems in manufacturingProcedia Computer Science10.1016/j.procs.2022.01.248200(505-516)Online publication date: 2022
    • (2021)Implicating Human Values for designing a Digital Government Collaborative Platform for Environmental Issues: A Value Sensitive Design ApproachSustainability10.3390/su1311624013:11(6240)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2021
    • (2021)The Moral Consideration of Artificial Entities: A Literature ReviewScience and Engineering Ethics10.1007/s11948-021-00331-827:4Online publication date: 9-Aug-2021
    • (2021)Artificial Intelligence Crime: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Foreseeable Threats and SolutionsEthics, Governance, and Policies in Artificial Intelligence10.1007/978-3-030-81907-1_13(251-282)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2021
    • (2021)Artificial Intelligence Crime: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Foreseeable Threats and SolutionsThe 2020 Yearbook of the Digital Ethics Lab10.1007/978-3-030-80083-3_14(195-227)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2021
    • (2021)A paradigm for assessing adults' and children's concepts of artificially intelligent virtual charactersHuman Behavior and Emerging Technologies10.1002/hbe2.2833:4(618-634)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2021
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media