Children between the ages of 3 and 6 were more likely to trust a robot than a human if its words seemed true. Specifically, the children in the study said they would rather make friends, share their secrets, and have a robot teacher than a living person. According to the scientists, this feature could be used for educational purposes to improve the academic performance of students with the help of social robots and to teach children to perceive machines more rationally. The study published in the Computers in Human Behavior magazine.
How did robots gain children's trust?
111 children aged 3-6 years participated in the study . They were divided into groups and began to show a video in which a pair of humans and a robot give names to the objects depicted in the picture. At first, the objects were known to the children, such as a comb, a plate or a ball, but some of the children watched videos where the robot named them incorrectly, while others — where a person made mistakes. In the second phase, the children were shown the same video, but with unfamiliar objects, and then the children were asked from whom they would like to learn the name of the object — from a person or a robot.
Among the children who saw in the first phase a robot that incorrectly named objects, the participants significantly more often wanted to ask a person for an answer. However, in cases where both the human and the robot correctly named the objects in the first video, the children significantly more often wanted to know the answer from the robot. And when they voiced the invented names of objects, the children more often believed that it was the robot that named them correctly, and not a person. Also, children more often believed that a person makes mistakes “on purpose”, which means that the mistakes of robots do not necessarily reduce trust in them as a partner for communication. But in the future, scientists would like to find out which features of work seem more trustworthy to children.