Humans don’t just lie to deceive: sometimes we lie to avoid hurting others, breaking one social norm to uphold another. As robots begin to transition from tools to team members working alongside humans, scientists need to find out how these norms about deception apply to robots. To investigate this, researchers asked people to give their opinions of three scenarios in which robots were deceptive. They found that a robot lying about the external world to spare someone pain was acceptable, but a robot lying about its own capabilities wasn’t — and that people usually blame third parties like deve…