Robot Teachers for Children? Young Children Trust Robots Depending on Their Perceived Accuracy and Agency

Children acquire extensive knowledge from others. Today, children receive information from not only people but also technological devices, like social robots. Two studies assessed whether young children appropriately trust technological informants. One hundred and four 3-year-olds learned the names...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Developmental psychology 2020-07, Vol.56 (7), p.1268-1277
Main Authors: Brink, Kimberly A., Wellman, Henry M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accuracy
Child, Preschool
Children
Comparative Analysis
Female
Human
Humans
Information Sources
Information Technology
Learning
Learning Processes
Male
Metacognition
Names
Novelty (Stimulus Dimension)
Predictor Variables
Respondents
Robotics
Robotics - instrumentation
Robots
School Teachers
Task Analysis
Teachers
Teaching
Technology
Toddlers
Trust
Trust (Psychology)
Trust (Social Behavior)
Vocabulary Development
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Summary:Children acquire extensive knowledge from others. Today, children receive information from not only people but also technological devices, like social robots. Two studies assessed whether young children appropriately trust technological informants. One hundred and four 3-year-olds learned the names of novel objects from either a pair of social robots or inanimate machines, where 1 informant was previously shown to be accurate and the other inaccurate. Children trusted information from an accurate social robot over an inaccurate one, as they have been shown to do for human informants, and even more so when they perceived the robots as having psychological agency. However, children did not learn selectively from inanimate, but accurate, machines. Children can learn from technological devices (e.g., social robots) but trust their information more when the device appears to have mindful agency.
ISSN:0012-1649
1939-0599
DOI:10.1037/dev0000884