According to a fascinating but unsettling study, kids are more inclined to trust robots and other technology than people.

Children demonstrated greater acceptance and empathy towards robots that made mistakes, according to research published in Computers in Human Behaviour.

111 children, ages three to six, participated in the study.

Because children encounter vast volumes of material on a daily basis from both the offline and online worlds, researchers sought to determine which sources they are more likely to choose and trust.

"The question then becomes, how do children choose who to learn from when faced with conflicting testimonies?" the researchers wrote in their published paper.

How was the study conducted?

The kids were divided into many groups and they were shown movies of humans and robots labelling both new and familiar objects.

Researchers tested the dependability of humans and machines by mislabeling everyday objects, like referring to a plate as a spoon.

trust robots
Image Source: The Engineer

Researchers took this action to find out how the kids felt about who they could trust the most.

Outcomes:

The kids were more eager to ask the robots to label the new things and were willing to accept that the labels were accurate. It's interesting to note that they preferred to divulge their secrets to robots over to people.

"Children's conceptualizations of the agents making a mistake also differed, such that an unreliable human was selected as doing things on purpose, but not an unreliable robot," the investigators wrote.

"These findings suggest that children's perceptions of a robot's reliability are separate from their evaluation of its desirability as a social interaction partner and its perceived agency," they further wrote.

Children's replies varied slightly depending on their age group as well. For example, older children were more likely than younger ones to trust robots. The researchers questioned, "What exactly about the robot makes it preferable, remains an open question."

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