Constrained Choice: Children's and Adults’ Attribution of Choice to a Humanoid Robot

Abstract

Young children, like adults, understand that human agents can flexibly choose different actions in different contexts, and they evaluate these agents based on such choices. However, little is known about children's tendencies to attribute the capacity to choose to robots, despite increased contact with robotic agents. In this paper, we compare 5-to 7-year-old children's and adults' attributions of free choice to a robot and to a human child by using a series of tasks measuring agency attribution, action prediction, and choice attribution. In morally neutral scenarios, children ascribed similar levels of free choice to the robot and the human, while adults were more likely to ascribe free choice to the human. For morally relevant scenarios, however, both age groups considered the robot's actions to be more constrained than the human's actions. These findings demonstrate that children and adults hold a nuanced understanding of free choice that is sensitive to both the agent type and constraints within a given scenario.

The minds of machines: Children's beliefs about the experiences, thoughts, and morals of familiar interactive technologies.

“…In support of this, we found that by around 8 years old, children began to recognize that a technology's programming limits them from performing certain actions. By 10 years old, children began to recognize that a technology's programming can even limit it from avoiding harm, similar to adults’ beliefs about technologies’ limitations (Flanagan et al, 2021). Anecdotal evidence from children's spontaneous comments during the interview offers some support for this idea as well.…”

“…Our methodology was an interview format, including questions from prior studies that investigated different aspects of children's agency beliefs of technologies and that had different question formats (Brink et al, 2019; Chernyak & Gary, 2016; Flanagan et al, 2021; Severson & Lemm, 2016). This was an initial step towards creating a comprehensive questionnaire to investigate children's technology beliefs, but more work is needed to address the current limitations.…”

“…Nao robots are humanoid in shape, with legs, arms, a torso, and a head with eyes and a mouth, and are 58 cm tall. Participants first watched a video on an iPad of the technology performing its normal functions and were then asked a series of questions about the technology's physical, emotional, mental, deservingness of moral treatment, the intentionality of actions, and ontological status (Brink et al, 2019; Chernyak & Gary, 2016; Flanagan et al, 2021; Severson & Lemm, 2016).…”

“…We also extended the questionnaire to include questions relating to moral status—moral treatment (Chernyak & Gary, 2016) and judgments of moral intent (Flanagan et al, 2021). For questions relating to moral treatment, we asked whether it was okay to hit or yell at the technological agent (Chernyak & Gary, 2016).…”

Expectations of how machines use individuating information and base-rates

“…Some recent work is broadly consistent with the possibility that people expect machines to differ from humans in how they prioritize information when making decisions. For example, children and adults expect robots to make different choices than humans when faced with the same situation (Flanagan et al, 2021). Also, people often rate computers and robots as less able than humans to have many mental states, but especially desires and emotions (Bigman & Gray, 2018;Gray et al, 2007;Haslam et al, 2008;Weisman et al, 2017).…”