From Intent to Accountability: Exploring the Role of Mental States in Robot Accountability

Mental states, such as beliefs, intentions, and desires, have been considered key elements of human agency, indicating one’s capacity to act deliberately and with awareness. Thus, these mental states have been treated as crucial factors in assessing human accountability. However, it remains unclear whether these mental states are equally important to robot agency and, by extension, to robot accountability. To explore this tension, we investigated how participants judged the relevance of mental states in determining the accountability of an industrial robotic arm or a humanoid robot compared to a human after a workplace accident in which a worker was injured. Our results showed that participants viewed desires, beliefs, and intentions as significantly less relevant when assessing the accountability of robots than humans, and robots were judged as less accountable overall. These findings suggest a need to move beyond human-centered views of agencyparticularly those based on assumptions about mental stateswhen discussing the accountability of robots.