The Attribution of Rationality to Robots

An increasing number of studies are attempting to determine, through quantitative experimentation, whether people adopt an intentional stance towards robots. These studies mainly use questionnaires in which participants are asked to choose between mentalistic and non-mentalis- tic descriptions of robotic behaviours portrayed in pictures. While these methods are extremely interesting in their attempt to operationalise Den- nett’s theoretical constructs, they only capture one aspect of the inten- tional stance: the attribution of mental states to robots. They neglect the question of whether participants also attribute rationality to the system. Consequently, they are not well equipped to analyse how people form expectations about the behaviour of the robots they interact with, which is crucial for studying the dynamics of human–robot interaction. There is indeed no reason to deny that laypeople might occasionally attribute mental states to robots while believing that they can act irrationally or model the decision-making processes of the system in terms devoid of any reference to rationality. Building on these considerations, this article re- flects on an emerging area of research in human-robot interaction from a philosophical perspective, identifying a potential limitation that could be overcome by referring to psychological literature on the attribution of rationality to humans.