Most Recent Publication

Kim, B., Zhu, Q., Phillips, E., & Williams, T. (2025). From intent to accountability: Exploring the role of mental states in robot accountability. Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics and Its Social Impacts (ARSO), Osaka, Japan. July 17-19, 2025.​
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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.

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Who We Are

LANCSET (Laboratory and Network for the Cultural and Ethical Studies of Emerging Technologies) is an interdisciplinary research group at Virginia Tech. ​

Based at Virginia Tech, LANCSET is an open and inclusive laboratory and community of scholars dedicated to exploring technology and engineering through culturally responsive lenses. We explore the role of cultures in shaping the professional formation of socially responsible and globally competent engineers, as well as the ethical development and deployment of critical and emerging technologies such as AI, robotics, and quantum computing. In our research, we examine various levels of cultural concepts, including individual cultural traits, classroom learning environments, professional and discipline-based norms, institutional and organizational cultures, sociocultural metaphors, and cross-cultural and global contexts. We frequently draw on less prominent Western intellectual resources (e.g., pragmatism) and non-Western philosophical traditions (e.g., Confucianism) in our theory-building and empirical inquiry. We employ philosophical and conceptual approaches, as well as interpretive and experimental methods, in our research.

If you are interested in exploring potential collaboration opportunities, please visit the Contact Us page to leave a message or send us an email. We thank you for your interest in our work and look forward to collaborating with you!​