### Main article
Willems, J., Schmidthuber, L., Vogel, D., Ebinger, F., & Vanderelst, D. (2022). Ethics of robotized public services: The role of robot design and its actions. *Government Information Quarterly*, 39(2), 101683. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2022.101683
### Abstract
Public administrations invest heavily in the development of ‘smart’ public services, including autonomous public service robots. Since public service robots are designed to operate unsupervised, robots must interact in an ethically acceptable way with citizens. Robots are often designed to provide a comfortable interaction with citizens, which can be achieved by making the robot's appearance and actions more human-like. This raises the question whether a human-like design affects the ethicalness evaluation of a robot's actions. In a laboratory experiment with eye-tracking (n1 = 156) and a representative, online vignette experiment (n2 = 1339), we find that a more human-like robot design draws more visual attention than a robot with a less human-like design. However, the robot's appearance does not affect the ethicalness evaluation of the robot's behavior. In contrast, our results show that it is not the more human-like appearance that influences evaluations of ethicalness, but a robot's ethical actions influence the extent to which it is perceived as human. We frame our findings in the scientific and practitioner debates on ethical rule-setting for (public) service robots.
### Reproducibility
**Code Ocean**
There is a **Code Ocean Capsule** for long-term computational reproducibility: https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.7519164.v1.
You can easily reproduce our results using the free service of [Code Ocean][1]:
1. Open the paper's Code Ocean Capsule: https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.7519164.v1
2. Log-in to Code Ocean
3. Click *Re-Run*
4. Code Ocean runs a virtual environment and reproduces the results.
You can inspect the *R* code by clicking on the `code/Study1.Rmd` or `code/Study2.Rmd` files in the left panel.
You can also run an interactive version using Code Ocean.
**On your own machine (using your own *R* installation)**
If you want to reproduce our results on your own computer you need *R* (we used version 4.0.1) and RStudio.
1. Download the full OSF Storage of the Project
2. Make sure that you installed all required packages
3. Open `Laboratory - Eyetracking/README(1_2_ManinAnalysis).Rmd` or `Survey - Austria/Survey.Rmd` in RStudio.
4. Click "Knit"
