Bertram F. Malle

• Ph.D. (Stanford, 1995)
• Professor at Brown University

We propose that any robots that collaborate with, look after, or help humans - in short, social robots - must have moral competence. But what does moral competence consist of? We offer a framework for moral competence that attempts to be comprehensive in capturing capacities that make humans morally competent and that therefore represent candidates...

People interpret behavior by making inferences about agents' intentionality, mind, and personality. Past research studied such inferences 1 at a time; in real life, people make these inferences simultaneously. The present studies therefore examined whether 4 major inferences (intentionality, desire, belief, and personality), elicited simultaneously...

The actor-observer hypothesis (E. E. Jones & R. E. Nisbett, 1971) states that people tend to explain their own behavior with situation causes and other people's behavior with person causes. Widely known in psychology, this asymmetry has been described as robust, firmly established, and pervasive. However, a meta-analysis on 173 published studies re...

Attribution research has held a prominent place in social psychology for 50years, and the dominant theory of attribution has been the same for all this time. Unfortunately, this theory (a version of attribution as covariation detection) cannot account for people's ordinary explanations of behavior. The goal here is to present a theory that can. The...

We introduce a theory of blame in five parts. Part 1 addresses what blame is: a unique moral judgment that is both cognitive and social, regulates social behavior, fundamentally relies on social cognition, and requires warrant. Using these properties, we distinguish blame from such phenomena as anger, event evaluation, and wrongness judgments. Part...

The Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology is an essential guide to the study of moral cognition and behavior. Originating as a philosophical exploration of values and virtues, moral psychology has evolved into a robust empirical science intersecting psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and neuroscience. Contributors to this interdiscip...

The term moral psychology is commonly used in at least two different senses. In the history of philosophy, moral psychology has referred to a branch of moral philosophy that addresses conceptual and theoretical questions about the psychological basis of morality, often (but not always) from a normative perspective (Tiberius, 2015). In the empirical...

Introduction Robots are being introduced into increasingly social environments. As these robots become more ingrained in social spaces, they will have to abide by the social norms that guide human interactions. At times, however, robots will violate norms and perhaps even deceive their human interaction partners. This study provides some of the fir...

This study investigates how people assign blame to autonomous vehicles (AVs) when involved in an accident. Our experiment (N = 2647) revealed that people placed more blame on AVs than on human drivers when accident details were unspecified. To examine whether people assess major classes of blame-relevant information differently for AVs and humans,...

Due to their unique persuasive power, language-capable robots must be able to both adhere to and communicate human moral norms. These requirements are complicated by the possibility that people may blame humans and robots differently for violating those norms. These complications raise particular challenges for robots giving moral advice to decisio...

Building and maintaining trust is critical for continued human-robot teaching and the prospect of robot learning social skills from natural environments. Whereas previous work often explored strategies to reduce system errors, mitigate trust loss, or using enhanced interactivity to induce learning success, few studies have investigated the possible...

Robotic animal-like companions for older adults are promising technologies to address companionship and new models of care. Our project, Affordable Robotic Intelligence for Elderly Support, aims to design smart communication capabilities in an Ageless Innovation Joy for All™ robotic cat. The cat robot with enhanced capabilities uses intuitive digit...

The Cambridge Handbook of Computational Cognitive Sciences is a comprehensive reference for this rapidly developing and highly interdisciplinary field. Written with both newcomers and experts in mind, it provides an accessible introduction of paradigms, methodologies, approaches, and models, with ample detail and illustrated by examples. It should...

The authors at times propose that robots are mere depictions of social agents (a philosophical claim) and at other times that people conceive of social robots as depictions (an empirical psychological claim). We evaluate each claim's accuracy both now and in the future and, in doing so, we introduce two dangerous misperceptions people have, or will...

Robots are increasingly taking on roles in contexts in which ethical decision making is necessary. In this paper, we offer a set of tools to study one central capacity of future moral robots: to have norm competence and, in particular, to make acceptable decisions when moral norms conflict with one another. Our efforts are in line with growing tren...

Bertram Malle, Lisa Chalik, and Jason Corwin are relatively staunch defenders of institutional science. They acknowledge that science is an imperfect moral community, but they see its existing mechanisms of self-correction as the most likely avenue for improvement. Akin to Churchill’s much-quoted assertion that “democracy is the worst form of gover...

Microaggressions are subtle, offensive comments that are directed at minority group members and are characteristically ambiguous in meaning. In two studies, we explored how observers interpreted such ambiguous statements by comparing microaggressions to faux pas, offenses caused by the speaker having an incidental false belief. In Experiment 1, we...

As robots rapidly enter society, how does human social cognition respond to their novel presence? Focusing on one foundational social-cognitive capacity—visual perspective taking—seven studies reveal that people spontaneously adopt a robot's unique perspective and do so with patterns of variation that mirror perspective taking toward humans. As the...

Blame is not only a cognitive process but also a social act of moral criticism. Such acts of criticism often serve to correct a transgressor’s behavior but can be costly—to the moral critic, the transgressor, and the community. To limit these costs, blame is socially regulated: Communities set standards of evidence for blame and expect individuals...

Robotic animal-like companions for older adults are promising technologies that have shown to have health benefits, especially for individuals with dementia, and good adoption rates in some previous studies. Our project, Affordable Robotic Intelligence for Elderly Support, aims to design new capabilities for companionship and smart care, but at hig...

As robots begin to occupy our social spaces, touch will increasingly become part of human–robot interactions. This paper examines the impact of observing a robot touch a human on trust in that robot. In three online studies, observers watched short videos of human–robot interactions and provided a series of judgments about the robot, which either d...

Blame is not only a cognitive process but also a social act of moral criticism. Such acts of criticism often serve to correct a transgressor's behavior but can be costly—to the moral critic, the transgressor, and the community. To limit these costs, blame is socially regulated: Communities set standards of evidence for blame and expect individuals...

What is the mind? Scientists may not agree on an answer, but new research shows that people across diverse cultures do. This shared conception of the human mind appears to be a cognitive structure that organizes numerous mental capacities along a small number of dimensions: bodily sensation, cognition and, in some cultural settings, emotion.

Norms are central to social life. They help people select actions that benefit the community and facilitate behavior prediction and coordination. However, little is known about the cognitive properties of norms. Here we focus on norm activation, context specificity, and how those properties differ for the two major types of norms: prescriptions and...

Type 1 diabetes (T1D), previously known as juvenile diabetes, has a large impact on everyday life and can pose a number of challenges for both children and their parents. A patient-centered design company, Sproutel, has designed and developed Jerry the Bear®—an interactive augmented reality (AR) stuffed animal toy bear designed to provide children...

Humans have a large number of capacities that allow them to make sense of other agents' minds. I discuss these mentalizing capacities under the broader label social cognition and propose that social cognition is hierarchically organized, ranging from lower-order capacities (e.g., detecting agents and their goals) to higher-order capacities (e.g., s...

Due to their unique persuasive power, language-capable robots must be able to both act in line with human moral norms and clearly and appropriately communicate those norms. These requirements are complicated by the possibility that humans may ascribe blame differently to humans and robots. In this work, we explore how robots should communicate in m...

Due to their unique persuasive power, language-capable robots must be able to both act in line with human moral norms and clearly and appropriately communicate those norms. These requirements are complicated by the possibility that humans may ascribe blame differently to humans and robots. In this work, we explore how robots should communicate in m...

Research on morality has increased rapidly over the past 10 years. At the center of this research are moral judgments—evaluative judgments that a perceiver makes in response to a moral norm violation. But there is substantial diversity in what has been called moral judgment. This article offers a framework that distinguishes, theoretically and empi...

From collaborators in factories to companions in homes, social robots hold the promise to intuitively and efficiently assist and work alongside people. However, human trust in robotic systems is crucial if these robots are to be adopted and used in home and work. In this chapter we take trust to be a set of expectations about the robot's capabiliti...

Previous work across multiple disciplines has shown that norms have a powerful impact on behavior. Little is known, however about how norms are represented in the mind. Here we examine whether people's norm representations come in reliably identifiable grades of strength. Classical models of norms distinguished between the broad deontic categories...

Robots are entering a wide range of society’s private and public settings, often with a strikingly humanlike appearance and emulating a humanlike mind. But what constitutes humanlikeness—in both body and mind—has been conceptually and methodologically unclear. In three studies based on a collection of 251 real-world robots, we report the first prog...

As robots rapidly enter society, how does human social cognition respond to their novel presence? Focusing on one foundational social-cognitive capacity—visual perspective taking— six studies reveal that people spontaneously adopt a robot’s unique perspective and do so with patterns of variation that mirror perspective taking toward humans. As with...

We describe a theoretical framework and recent research on one key aspect of robot ethics: the development and implementation of a robot’s moral competence. As autonomous machines take on increasingly social roles in human communities, these machines need to have some level of moral competence to ensure safety, acceptance, and justified trust. We r...

Even though morally competent artificial agents have yet to emerge in society, we need insights from empirical science into how people will respond to such agents and how these responses should inform agent design. Three survey studies presented participants with an artificial intelligence (AI) agent, an autonomous drone, or a human drone pilot fac...

Modern human societies demand enforcement of social and moral norms using two types of sanctions that have distinct historical origins. Informal sanctions (e.g., chiding a relative) have existed since the dawn of humanity, whereas formal sanctions (e.g., punishment by the state) emerged more recently—over the last few thousand years, when laws bega...

It has long been assumed that when people observe robots they intuitively ascribe mind and intentionality to them, just as they do to humans. However, much of this evidence relies on experimenter-provided questions or self-reported judgments. We propose a new way of investigating people's mental state ascriptions to robots by carefully studying exp...

Despite extensive recent investigations of moral judgments, little is known about how negative judgments like blame might differ from positive judgments like praise. Drawing on theory from both social and moral cognition, the present studies identify and test potential asymmetries in the extremity and differentiatedness of blame as compared to prai...

Human behavior is frequently guided by social and moral norms, and no human community can exist without norms. Robots that enter human societies must therefore behave in norm-conforming ways as well. However, currently there is no solid cognitive or computational model available of how human norms are represented, activated, and learned. We provide...

Six experiments examine people’s updating of blame judgments and test predictions developed from a socially regulated blame perspective. According to this perspective, blame emerged in human history as a socially costly tool for regulating other’s behavior. Because it is costly for both blamers and violators, blame is typically constrained by requi...

Six experiments examine people's updating of blame judgments and test predictions developed from a socially-regulated blame perspective. According to this perspective, blame emerged in human history as a socially costly tool for regulating other’s behavior. Because it is costly for both blamers and violators, blame is typically constrained by requi...

The emergence of robots in everyday life raises the question of how people explain the behavior of robots-in particular, whether they explain robot behavior the same way as they explain human behavior. However, before we can examine whether people's explanations differ for human and robot agents, we need to establish whether people judge basic prop...

Research on trust in human-human interaction has typically focused on notions of vulnerability, integrity, and exploitation whereas research on trust in human-machine interaction has typically focused on competence and reliability. In this initial study, we explore whether these different aspects of trust can be considered parts of a multidimension...

The increasing complexity of robotic systems are pressing the need for them to be transparent and trustworthy. When people interact with a robotic system, they will inevitably construct mental models to understand and predict its actions. However, people»s mental models of robotic systems stem from their interactions with living beings, which induc...

Anthropomorphic robots, or robots with human-like appearance features such as eyes, hands, or faces, have drawn considerable attention in recent years. To date, what makes a robot appear human-like has been driven by designers» and researchers» intuitions, because a systematic understanding of the range, variety, and relationships among constituent...

Our theoretical framework tries to elucidate the processes of moral cognition by showing their connections to both social cognition and social regulation. We argue that a hierarchy of social cognitive tools ground moral cognition and that social and moral cognition together guide the social regulation of behavior. The practice of social-moral regul...

Attribution theory aims to elucidate how ordinary people make sense of human behavior. It has followed two lines of research. One examines attribution as explanation: how people explain why a person performed a certain behavior. This research shows that people offer reasons for intentional behaviors and causes for unintentional behaviors. The other...

Robot design is a critical component of human-robot interaction. A robot’s appearance shapes people’s expectations of that robot, which in turn affect human-robot interaction. This paper reports on an exploratory analysis of 155 drawings of robots that were collected across three studies. The purpose was to gain a better understanding of people’s a...

Human behavior is frequently guided by social and moral norms; in fact, no societies, no social groups could exist without norms. However, there are few cognitive science approaches to this central phenomenon of norms. While there has been some progress in developing formal representations of norm systems (e.g., deontological approaches), we do not...

The main reason for raising the question about the ethical behavior of robots is the rapid progress in the development of autonomous social robots that are specifically created to be deployed in sensitive human environments, from elder and health care settings to law enforcement and military contexts. Clearly, such tasks and environments are very d...

Previous research has investigated whether people can spontaneously and accurately take another person’s visual perspective, but little is known about when people actually engage in perspective taking. Can perceiving another person’s goal-directed actions lead to adopting their unique perceptual viewpoint? In this paper, we examine whether merely o...

When people make moral judgments, what information do they look for? Despite its theoretical and practical implications, this question has largely been neglected by prior literature. The recent Path Model of Blame predicts a canonical order in which people acquire information when judging blame. Upon discovering a negative event, perceivers conside...

Joint attention (JA) is hypothesized to have a close relationship with developing theory of mind (ToM) capabilities. We tested the co-occurrence of ToM and JA in social interactions between adults with no reported history of psychiatric illness or neurodevelopmental disorders. Participants engaged in an experimental task that encouraged nonverbal c...

We took a first step in developing a measurement tool for the social and mental capacities that people desire in social robots. 291 respondents indicated the degree to which they would like to see 16 capacities in either a home robot, nursing robot, or military robot. Four orthogonal dimensions emerged: Social-Moral Skills, Autonomous Evaluation, O...

Many of the benefits promised by human-robot interaction require successful continued interaction between a human and a robot; trust is a key component of such interaction. We investigate whether having a person "n the loop" with a robot---i.e., the mere involvement of a person with a robot---affects human-robot trust. We posited that people who pr...

The most intriguing and ethically challenging roles of robots in society are those of collaborator and social partner. We propose that such robots must have the capacity to learn, represent, activate, and apply social and moral norms—they must have a norm capacity. We offer a theoretical analysis of two parallel questions: what constitutes this nor...

There is broad consensus that features such as causality, mental states, and preventability are key inputs to moral judgments of blame. What is not clear is exactly how people process these inputs to arrive at such judgments. Three studies provide evidence that early judgments of whether or not a norm violation is intentional direct information pro...

Robot ethics encompasses ethical questions about how humans should design, deploy, and treat robots; machine morality encompasses questions about what moral capacities a robot should have and how these capacities could be computationally implemented. Publications on both of these topics have doubled twice in the past 10 years but have often remaine...

Within social psychology, it is well accepted that trait inference is the dominant tool for understanding others’ behavior. Outside of social psychology, a different consensus has emerged, namely, that people predominantly explain behavior in terms of mental states. Both positions are based on limited evidence. The trait literature focuses on trait...

According to previous research, threatening people’s belief in free will may undermine moral judgments and behavior. Four studies tested this claim. Study 1 used a Velten technique to threaten people’s belief in free will and found no effects on moral behavior, judgments of blame, and punishment decisions. Study 2 used six different threats to free...

To successfully navigate the complex social world, people often need to solve the problem of perspective selection: Between two conflicting viewpoints of the self and the other, whose perspective should one take? In two experiments, we show that four-year-olds use others' knowledge and goals to decide when to engage in visual perspective taking. Ch...

We argue that people intuitively distinguish epistemic (knowable) uncertainty from aleatory (random) uncertainty and show that the relative salience of these dimensions is reflected in natural language use. We hypothesize that confidence statements (e.g., "I am fairly confident," "I am 90% sure," "I am reasonably certain") communicate a subjective...

Visual perspective taking plays a fundamental role in both human-human interaction and human-robot interaction (HRI). In three experiments, we took a novel approach to the topic of visual perspective taking in HRI, examining whether, and under what conditions, people spontaneously take a robot's visual perspective. Using two different robot models,...

Attribution is primarily the process of ascribing a cause to an event or explaining the event. Secondarily, the term 'attribution' refers to certain inferences or judgments, such as inferences of personality traits from behavior and judgments of responsibility and blame. Psychological research on attribution was inspired by Heider (1958), who argue...

Moral norms play an essential role in regulating human interaction. With the growing sophistication and proliferation of robots, it is important to understand how ordinary people apply moral norms to robot agents and make moral judgments about their behavior. We report the first comparison of people's moral judgments (of permissibility, wrongness,...

We begin by illustrating that long before the cognitive revolution, social psychology focused on topics pertaining to what is now known as social cognition: people’s subjective interpretations of social situations and the concepts and cognitive processes underlying these interpretations. We then examine two questions: whether social cognition entai...

ABSTRACT We investigated longitudinal relations among gaze following and face scanning in infancy and later language development. At 12 months, infants watched videos of a woman describing an object while their passive viewing was measured with an eye-tracker. We examined the relation between infants' face scanning behavior and their tendency to fo...