arXiv AI September 7, 2026 By Fernanda Mansilla, Aloysius Tok, Bahia Guella\"i, Farah Benamara, Nancy F. Chen

How do LLMs Evaluate Perceived Moral Agency? Investigating Moral Decision-Making in Human-Artificial Agents Interactions

The paper reports the first empirical study comparing how humans and large language models (LLMs) evaluate perceived moral agency (PMA) in both human and autonomous artificial agents within smart city scenarios. Using a validated PMA scale, 190 human participants and various LLMs were assessed, revealing that humans are perceived to have higher moral agency than artificial agents. When confronted with moral dilemmas, LLMs focus on situational factors such as harm severity and urgency, mirroring the context‑sensitivity observed in human raters.

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