Perceived Moral Agency Scale (PMA)
This is the most up-to-date version of this scale.
Construct Summary
The authors define the perceived moral agency as:
a measure of the human attribution of the status of a machine’s agency and/or morality (independent of whether it actually has agency or morality) (p. 365)
The scale consists of two dimensions:
Morality, featuring a cluster of both rational and intuited morality items and Dependency, featuring semantically reversed items associated with both autonomy and intentionality, representing an absence of agency and reliance on programming or other human control. (p. 366)
Rating = 85%
| Check? | Guideline Item |
|---|---|
| ✓ | Is the construct defined? |
| ✓ | Does the final version of the items capture the construct as it has been defined by the authors? |
| ✓ | Is the item generation process discussed (e.g., literature review, Delphi method, crowd-sourcing)? |
| ✖ | Person to items 10:1 for the initial set of items? |
| ✓ | Did they perform an EFA, PCA, Rasch, or similar test to determine the item to factor relationship? |
| ✓ | Did they describe how they determined number of factors? |
| ✓ | Did they report the full initial set of items? |
| ✖ | Did they provide loadings (EFA) or item fits (Rasch) of all items? |
| ✓ | Is there a description of the item removal process (e.g., using infit/outfit, factor loading minimum value, or cross-loading values)? |
| ✓ | Did they list the final items included in the scale? |
| ✓ | Did they include a factor structure test (e.g., second EFA, CFA, DIF, test for unidimensionality when using Rasch, or similar)? |
| ✓ | Was a measure of reliability (e.g., Cronbach’s alpha, McDonalds Omega_h or Omega_t, Tarkkonen’s Rho) reported? |
| ✓ | Was a test of validity (e.g., predictive, concurrent, convergent, discriminant) reported? |
Comments None
Reviewed by Experts ✓
Downloads
PAPER
Banks, J. (2019). A perceived moral agency scale: Development and validation of a metric for humans and social machines. Computers in Human Behavior, 90, 363-371.
PDF of scale as well as instructions for administration and scoring are not readily available. Check the paper for more details or email hriscaledatabase@gmail.com submit this information if you are the author of this scale.
Final Scale Items (10 total):
Morality
This X has a sense for what is right and wrong.
This X can think through whether an action is moral.
This X might feel obligated to behave in a moral way.
This X is capable of being rational about good and evil.
This X behaves according to moral rules.
This X would refrain from doing things that have painful repurcussions.
Dependency
This X can only behave how it is programmed to behave.
This Xs actions are the result of its programming.
This X can only do what humans tell it to do.
This X would never do anything it was not programmed to do.