Trust in artificial moral advisors across cultures
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Developers of artificial intelligence are already building prototypes for artificial moral advisors: autonomous systems designed to provide humans with recommendations on ethical issues. Yet it remains unclear whether people will trust and adopt these technologies. In a large-scale cross-cultural experiment (12 countries; N = 6,896), we investigate perceptions of human and artificial moral advisors who give advice in moral dilemmas based on competing ethical principles. We show that people trust artificial advisors less than human ones, especially when their advice aligns with utilitarian rather than deontological principles. Nonetheless, people update their own moral judgments in the direction of advice from AI advisors, and do so more when the advice is deontological. Our findings raise challenges for the design, development, and deployment of artificial moral advisors and pose serious questions about the potential influence of machines on human morality, with implications for AI governance.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Authors: Scott Claessens, Konrad Bocian, Paulo Boggio, Grégory Fiorio, Léo Fitouchi, Zeynep Genc, Ivar Rodríguez Hannikainen, Lea Charlotte Kamitz, Tamino Konur, Ethan Landes, Peng Liu, Katarzyna Miazek, Waldir M. Sampaio, Jorge Suárez, Pierce Veitch, Onurcan Yilmaz, Hongbo Yu, Jim Albert Charlton Everett
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7140189809