# Which Artificial Intelligences Do People Care About Most? A Conjoint Experiment on Moral Consideration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09405 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09405/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [FineCLIPER: Multi-modal Fine-grained CLIP for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition with AdaptERs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02157/) (2024)
- [Perceptions of Sentient AI and Other Digital Minds: Evidence from the AI, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS) Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08867/) (2024)
- [Digital Companionship: Overlapping Uses of AI Companions and AI Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15905/) (2025)
- [Mental Models of Autonomy and Sentience Shape Reactions to AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09085/) (2025)
- [Alignment Is Not Enough: A Relational Framework for Moral Standing in Human-AI Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00078/) (2026)
- [Method, Mind, and Morality: How People Make Sense of Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24748/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many studies have identified particular features of artificial intelligences (AI), such as their autonomy and emotion expression, that affect the extent to which they are treated as subjects of moral consideration. However, there has not yet been a comparison of the relative importance of features as is necessary to design and understand increasingly capable, multi-faceted AI systems. We conducted an online conjoint experiment in which 1,163 participants evaluated descriptions of AIs that varied on these features. All 11 features increased how morally wrong participants considered it to harm the AIs. The largest effects were from human-like physical bodies and prosociality (i.e., emotion expression, emotion recognition, cooperation, and moral judgment). For human-computer interaction designers, the importance of prosociality suggests that, because AIs are often seen as threatening, the highest levels of moral consideration may only be granted if the AI has positive intentions.