Abstract
Written vignettes are often used in experiments to explore potential differences between the way participants interpret the behaviour and mental states of artificial autonomous actors (hence A-bots) contrasted against human actors. A reoccurring result from this body of research has been the similarity of results in mental-state attributions between A-bots and humans. This paper reports the results of a short measure consisting of four questions. We find that by asking participants about whether A-bots can feel pain or pleasure, whether they deserve rights, or whether they would be good parents, satisfactory differences can be derived between human and A-bot groups. By asking these questions, experimenters can be more confident that participants are constructing mental representations of A-bots differently than those of humans.
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Ashton, H., Franklin, M. (2022). A Method to Check that Participants Really are Imagining Artificial Minds When Ascribing Mental States. In: Stephanidis, C., Antona, M., Ntoa, S., Salvendy, G. (eds) HCI International 2022 – Late Breaking Posters. HCII 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1655. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19682-9_59
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19682-9_59
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