Understanding the Adoption Intention of AI through the Ethics Lens

Understanding users and user behaviors in accepting new technologies such as AI has been ever more important. Meanwhile, information systems with AI inevitably engenders such ethical issues as transparency and accountability related to the consequences of recognition, decisions, and recommendations. Our work adds moral psychology variables to Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) in order to better explicate the adoption aspects of AI. For the research, we employed social desirability, and self-consistency of moral psychology as underlying attitudes. And also, moral norm is added to TRA to moderate the effect of the attitudes on the outcome variable. The empirical results indicate a direct and indirect role of the morality-related variables in explaining users' AI adoption intentions. It was learned that moral psychology plays an important role in explaining user attitudes toward AI and subsequent intentions of adopting an AI system.