Reinecke Madeline G, Wilks Matti, Bloom Paul
University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Cognition. 2025 Jan;254:105983. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105983. Epub 2024 Nov 9.
Emerging evidence suggests that children may think of robots-and artificial intelligence, more generally-as having moral standing. In this paper, we trace the developmental trajectory of this belief. Over three developmental studies (combined N = 415) and one adult study (N = 156), we compared participants' judgments (Experiments 1-3) and donation choices (Experiment 4) towards a human boy, a humanoid robot, and control targets. We observed that, on the whole, children endorsed robots as having moral standing and mental life. With age, however, they tended to deny experiential mental life to robots, which aligned with diminished ascription of moral standing. Older children's judgments more closely mirrored those of adult participants, who overwhelmingly denied these attributes to robots. This sheds new light on children's moral cognitive development and their relationship to emerging technologies.
新出现的证据表明，儿童可能会更普遍地认为机器人和人工智能具有道德地位。在本文中，我们追踪了这种信念的发展轨迹。通过三项发展研究（总样本量N = 415）和一项成人研究（N = 156），我们比较了参与者对一个人类男孩、一个类人机器人和控制目标的判断（实验1 - 3）以及捐赠选择（实验4）。我们观察到，总体而言，儿童认可机器人具有道德地位和心理生活。然而，随着年龄的增长，他们倾向于否认机器人具有体验性心理生活，这与对道德地位的归因减少相一致。年龄较大儿童的判断更接近成年参与者的判断，成年参与者绝大多数都否认机器人具有这些属性。这为儿童的道德认知发展及其与新兴技术的关系提供了新的见解。
