Anti Robot Speciesism

DATE SUBMITTED: March, 202 5 Words: 9, 22 0 2 Abstract H umanoid robots are a form of embodied artificial intelligence (AI) that look s and act s more and more like humans. Powered by generative AI and advances in robotics, humanoid robots can speak and interact with humans rather naturally but are still easily recognizable as robots. But how will we treat humanoids when they seem indistinguishable from humans in appearance and mind? We find a tendency (called "anti - robot" speciesism) to deny such robots humanlike capabilities, driven by motivations to accord members of the human species preferential treatment . Six experiments show that robots are denied humanlike attributes, simply because they are not biological beings and because humans want to avoid feelings of cognitive dissonance when utilizing such robots for unsavory tasks . Th us, pe ople do not rationally attribute capabilities to perfectly human like robots but deny them capabilities as it suits them . Keywords: robots, artificial intelligence, humanoids, speciesism, cognitive dissonance 3 In recent years, n ew artificial intelligen ce (AI) technologies have been introduced into the marketplace that have the potential to radically change people's work and lives . This paper examines how people might react to robots that seem be " perfectly human like " . With major companies like Amazon and Nvidia planning mass production of such robots, we are entering an era where the line between human and non - human entities is increasingly blurred. Our findings suggest that the advent of such robots will not lead people to rationally conclude that these robots are as capable as humans in performing some tasks . Rather, people will deny these robots humanlike attributes, driven by their motivation to prioritize their own species and to avoid feelings of cognitive dissonance from utilizing such robots for unsavory tasks. Aversion to Robots and AI People are often averse to robots. P sychological research has explained this effect by arguing that such "almost humanlike" robots appear as aesthetically dis pleasing, and that they remind people of zombies, death, or disease (Kätsyri et al., 2015; Mori, 1970; Wang et al., 2015) . Other psychological explanations focus on how people perceive robot minds, sometimes referred to as the "uncanny valley of mind" (Müller et al., 2021; Stein & Ohler, 2017) . These theories suggest that humanoid robots can be unsettling because they remind people of the human ability to experience feelings, even though these robots are not seen as having such capabilities (Gray & Wegner, 2012; Smith et al., 2021) .