Moral Psychology of Sex Robots: an experimental study -- How Pathogen Disgust is associated with interhuman sex but not interandroid sex

Abstract

The idea of sex with robots seems to fascinate the general public, raising both enthusiasm and revulsion. We ran two experimental studies (Ns = 172 and 260) where we compared people’s reactions to variants of stories about a person visiting a bordello. Our results show that paying for the services of a sex robot is condemned less harshly than paying for the services of a human sex worker, especially if the payer is married. We have for the first time experimentally confirmed that people are somewhat unsure about whether or not using a sex robot while in a committed monogamous relationship should be considered as infidelity. We also shed light on the psychological factors influencing attitudes towards sex robots, including disgust sensitivity and interest in science fiction. Our results indicate that sex with a robot is indeed genuinely considered as sex, and a sex robot is genuinely seen as a robot; thus, we show that standard research methods on sexuality and robotics are applicable also in research on sex robotics.

Treatments Approved, Boosts Eschewed: Moral Limits of Neurotechnological Enhancement

“…Indeed, greater science fiction hobbyism was associated with reduced dehumanization of hypothetical users of superhuman enhancement consistently. This implies that familiarity may breed acceptance, in approximately the same way as in previous studies on acceptance of mind upload technologies and sex robots (Laakasuo et al, 2018;Koverola et al, 2020). However, the exact causal route between exposure to science fiction and approval of futuristic technology NON-HUMAN SUPERHUMANS 40 is not obvious from these studies specifically, but they imply that adult developmental processes and cultural learning mechanisms play a role in forming moral judgments regarding new technologies.…”

“…Based on previous studies in which the binding moral foundations have been associated with aversion towards new technologies (e.g. Laakasuo, et al, 2018;Koverola, et al, 2020), we expected that the MFQ binding factor would be associated with disapproval of this technology generally. Given the empirical links between moralization of the binding foundations and individual differences in disgust sensitivity (Rozin et al, 1999), plays a role and included the Three Domains of Disgust Scale.…”

Authors’ response to Dr John Eggleton’s letter

“…We disagree with the false comparison between the human rights of homosexual or transgender citizens and tolerance of sex robots; the public too have more nuanced concerns 3. Our article attempted to analyse the purported health claims; as it stands, there is an ‘absence of evidence’ that sex robots carry any health benefit.…”

The shallow of your smile: The ethics of expressive vocal deepfakes

“…In recent years, this methodology has been applied to study factors underlying e.g. the moral acceptability of new technologies such as autonomous vehicles [8] or brain stimulation [38], potential public policies such as legalizing payments to kidney donors [15], but also downright futuristic scenarios such as mind upload [34], sex robots [31] or cognitive enhancement with brain implants [32] (Figure 1-D). The "empirical moral psychology" approach allows comparing different situation variants that may make or break dilemmas (e.g.…”

“…whether imagining oneself as the conductor of an autonomous car changes one's attitude to how to reacts to accidents - [8]) and whether these effects are modulated by individual differences (e.g. whether a person's familiarity with science-fiction themes modulate their attitude towards robots - [31]).…”