2026.Jan.26

REPORTS

Report on the 5th BAIRAL Research Meeting for Fiscal Year 2025

On January 8, 2026, the 5th BAIRAL Research Meeting of the 2025 academic year was held. For this session, we invited Minyi Wang, a PhD candidate at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory, University of Canterbury, who delivered a lecture titled “How we judge actions toward robots: testing the ethical asymmetry hypothesis.”

First, she introduced the background regarding the significance of human behavior toward robots. By providing concrete examples—such as whether one perceives it as vice to witness violence against a robot on the street, or as virtue to see someone holding an umbrella for a robot on a rainy day—she pointed out the current reality where bystanders make moral judgments even if the robots themselves do not feel pain. Her research explores the symmetry of good and evil evaluations in our interactions with robots through rigorous experimentation.

Following this, based on a detailed review of previous research, she designed her own stimuli and pre-tests. The study examined how moral actions toward artificial agents influence the attribution of the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, and courage. In the main experiment, involving 146 native English speakers recruited through Prolific, the correlation between moral behavior and perceived virtue was modeled using polynomial curve fitting across 40 text-based scenarios. The results indicated no detectable asymmetry between responses to morally negative and positive behaviors, contrasting with the traditional Ethical Asymmetry Hypothesis.

During the final Q&A session, there was a profound discussion on whether these experimental results were specific to the data samples and methodology of this study or pointed toward more ontological characteristics. Furthermore, the discussion extended to potential variations in results among non-native English speakers or non-Western societies, as well as the boundaries between humans and robots. In this way, the lecture provided a valuable opportunity to reconsider ethics in the age of AI.