Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Phillips to study moral justification to foster human-machine trust


Grant and Award Announcement

GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY

Elizabeth K. Phillips, Assistant Professor, Psychology, and her collaborators are set to begin a project in which they will investigate the rehabilitating role of justifications in human-autonomous agent interactions.  

All human communities, groups, and teams have norms that influence and regulate behavior, so autonomous agents that join these communities must know and follow the norms of their community. But even if we succeed in giving autonomous agents such norm competence, we are faced with a significant challenge: Norms can conflict with each other. Often, the only way to resolve conflicts between norms is by deciding to uphold one norm—the more important one—and to violate the other, less important norm.  This means that whenever an agent (human or machine) resolves a norm conflict, it must commit a norm violation.

When an agent must violate a norm in order to resolve a norm conflict, a justification explains why the agent acted in this way and why anybody who shares the community's norms should act in this way. Justifications clarify that the violation of one norm was socially and morally justified because it upheld the other, more important norm. 

Via a series of experiments, the researchers will demonstrate that, after resolving a norm conflict and committing a norm violation, an autonomous agent that justifies its actions-similar to a human who does so-will reduce the moral disapproval and repair the loss of trust that normally result from norm violations.

As for the importance of the project, Phillips said, "For autonomous agents like robots to act as members of well-functioning human communities, they will need to know, be responsive to, and prioritize the norms of those communities. This work seeks to create norm-aware agents that can be resilient to instances in which the agent will inevitably need to violate one norm to uphold a more important one---prioritizing safety over efficiency for instance---by giving agents the ability to justify their decision-making to human counterparts."

Phillips is set to receive $300,517 from the U.S. Department of the Air Force for this project. Funding will begin in September 2021 and will end in late August 2024.

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About George Mason University

George Mason University is Virginia's largest public research university. Located near Washington, D.C., Mason enrolls 38,000 students from 130 countries and all 50 states. Mason has grown rapidly over the last half-century and is recognized for its innovation and entrepreneurship, remarkable diversity and commitment to accessibility. Learn more at http://www.gmu.edu.

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