Adopting the intentional stance toward natural and artificial agents

Abstract

In our daily lives, we need to predict and understand others' behaviour in order to navigate through our social environment. Predictions concerning other humans' behaviour usually refer to their mental states, such as beliefs or intentions. Such a predictive strategy is called adoption of the intentional stance. In this paper, we review literature related to the concept of intentional stance from the perspectives of philosophy, psychology, human development, culture and human-robot interaction. We propose that adopting the intentional stance might be a central factor in facilitating social attunement with artificial agents. The paper first reviews the theoretical considerations regarding the intentional stance, and examines literature related to the development of intentional stance across the life span. Subsequently, it discusses cultural norms as grounded in the intentional stance and finally, it focuses on the issue of adopting the intentional stance towards artificial agents, such as humanoid robots. At the dawn of the artificial intelligence era, the question of how (and when) we predict and explain robots' behaviour by referring to mental states is of high interest. The paper concludes with the discussion of the ethical consequences of robots towards which we adopt the intentional stance, and sketches future directions in research on this topic.

Good Robots, Bad Robots: Morally Valenced Behavior Effects on Perceived Mind, Morality, and Trust

“…[57]). Humans infer mental states of robots as they do in humans so long as the robots' social cues are similar [60] via "social attunement" [61]. More direct mind ascription (i.e., willful acknowledgement of agent mindedness) is distinct and often divergent from preconscious mentalizing, likely because it requires elaborative processing that invokes agent-category heuristics [60].…”

Playing the Blame Game with Robots

“…Nevertheless, psychological and sociological investigations show that people are willing to attribute rich mental states to currently existing AI systems [1], including foreknowledge of bad outcomes [10] and intentions to deceive [11]. They are also willing to treat such systems as blameworthy [2]- [4], [12], [13].…”

“…As Malle and colleagues have shown, anthropomorphic AI systems are treated more like humans than their mechanical-looking counterparts, as far as morality is concerned ( [14], see also instanceproject.eu). Perhaps people are more willing to blame anthropomorphic AI systems because looking human naturally leads people to ascribe mental traits [1], [8]. Going beyond inferences based on the physical appearance of the robot, we decided to target the connection between the perceived capacity for inculpating mental states and moral evaluations directly.…”

Supplemental material for Of like mind: The (mostly) similar mentalizing of robots and humans.

“…However, the social-cognitive mechanisms promoting mentalizing of robots may break down under some conditions: When elaboration on the agent's behavior makes salient the machineontological status of the robot (Banks, 2020c), when such salience activates mental models including expectations of mindlessness of machines (cf., Perez-Osario & Wykowska, 2020;Thellman et al, 2020), or when a robot's social cues are uninterpretable (Banks, 2020c). Moreover, the manner in which mentalizing is inferred by researchers is of particular importance, as verbal and direct metrics (i.e., self-reports) do not always comport with nonverbal and indirect measures (i.e., behavioral indicators; Banks, 2020c;Thellman et al, 2020), likely because they are, respectively, associated with explicit/logical and implicit/intuitive processes, respectively (Takahashi et al, 2013).…”