Abstract
Narratives about artificial intelligence (AI) entangle autonomy, the capacity to self-govern, with sentience, the capacity to sense and feel. AI agents that perform tasks autonomously and companions that recognize and express emotions may activate mental models of autonomy and sentience, respectively, provoking distinct reactions. To examine this possibility, we conducted three pilot studies (N = 374) and four preregistered vignette experiments describing an AI as autonomous, sentient, both, or neither (N = 2,702). Activating a mental model of sentience increased general mind perception (cognition and emotion) and moral consideration more than autonomy, but autonomy increased perceived threat more than sentience. Sentience also increased perceived autonomy more than vice versa. Based on a within-paper meta-analysis, sentience changed reactions more than autonomy on average. By disentangling different mental models of AI, we can study human-AI interaction with more precision to better navigate the detailed design of anthropomorphized AI and prompting interfaces.
Recommended Citation
Pauketat, J. V., Shank, D. B., Manoli, A., & Anthis, J. R. (2026). Mental Models of Autonomy and Sentience Shape Reactions to AI. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790351
Department(s)
Psychological Science
Publication Status
Open Access
Keywords and Phrases
Agency; Autonomy; Digital Minds; Experience; Human-AI Interaction; Mind Perception; Moral Consideration; Sentience; Threat
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2026 Association for Computing Machinery, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Publication Date
13 Apr 2026
