ArticleNature2018
The Moral Machine experiment.
Article in Nature, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 194 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
194 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A review on AI Safety in highly automated driving.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2022Pooled it
- Association of natural sleep with moral utilitarianism: No evidence from 6 preregistered studies.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2021Pooled it
- Pooled it
- Self-protective and self-sacrificing preferences of pedestrians and passengers in moral dilemmas involving autonomous vehicles.PloS one · 2021Trial
- The Reverse Moral Foreign Language Effect in a Self-Driving Car Dilemma.International journal of psychology : Journal international de psychologie · 2026Article
- Article
- LLM agents overcome the machine penalty when acting fairly but not when acting selfishly or altruistically.National science review · 2026Article
- Article
- Visual Moral Inference and Communication.Topics in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Educating Students About Digital Health Research Ethics: Curricula Review and Expert Interview Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Article
- Advice quality and source disclosure shape trust in AI-generated ethical advice.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The Decision Process Scale (DPS): Self-report measures of reliance on rules, cost-benefit reasoning, intuition, and deliberation in (moral) decision-making.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Review
- Historical reconstruction of human moralization with word association and text corpora.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Justifiability and AI: putting explainability in its place.AI & society · 2026Article
- Video games as stimuli in neuroimaging studies: a minireview.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Review
- Goodness behind a wheel: moral judgment in realistic traffic simulations featuring Agents, Deeds, and Consequences.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- A moral Turing test: How belief and source shape detection of and agreement with LLM judgments.PloS one · 2026Article
- Ethical Governance Strategies for the Responsible Innovation of Neurotechnologies: A Scoping Review.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2025Article
- Geometrical Optimal Navigation and Path Planning-Bridging Theory, Algorithms, and Applications.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
134 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence have come concerns about how machines will make moral decisions, and the major challenge of quantifying societal expectations about the ethical principles that should guide machine behaviour. To address this challenge, we deployed the Moral Machine, an online experimental platform designed to explore the moral dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles. This platform gathered 40 million decisions in ten languages from millions of people in 233 countries and territories. Here we describe the results of this experiment. First, we summarize global moral preferences. Second, we document individual variations in preferences, based on respondents' demographics. Third, we report cross-cultural ethical variation, and uncover three major clusters of countries. Fourth, we show that these differences correlate with modern institutions and deep cultural traits. We discuss how these preferences can contribute to developing global, socially acceptable principles for machine ethics. All data used in this article are publicly available.
Indexed as
Identifiers
30356211What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.