Would Children Help a Robot in Need?

Abstract

Just as human-human behavior and interactions are important to study, human-robot interactions will take more prominence in the near future. These interactions will not only be in one direction, robots helping humans, but they will also be bidirectional with humans helping robots. This study examined the interactions between children and robots by observing whether children help a robot complete a task, and the contexts which elicited the most help. Five studies were conducted each consisting of 20 or more children per group with an approximate even number of boys and girls. Visitors to a science centre located in a major Western Canadian city were invited to participate in an experiment set up at the centre. Their behaviors with a robot, a small 5 degree of freedom robot arm programmed with a set of predefined tasks which could be selected during the experiments, were observed. Results of chi-square analyses indicated that children are most likely to help a robot after experiencing a positive introduction to it, X 2 (1) = 4.15, p = .04. Moreover, a positive introduction in combination with permission to help resulted in the vast majority (70%) of children helping. These results suggest that adult instructions about a robot impact children's perceptions and helping behaviors towards it. The generalizability of these results to children's helping behaviors towards people is also discussed.

Understanding how children understand robots: Perceived animism in child–robot interaction

“…It was approved by the university's Conjoint Health Research Ethics Board. Most children in this study also participated in another project on children's helping behaviors towards a robot (Beran et al, 2011). We found no significant differences in perceptions of animism across the conditions used in the helping study or any relationship with helping behaviors.…”

Now We’re Talking

“…Similarly, children are naturally inclined to help a "robot in need" when it displays distressed behavior, although the extent of helping depends on how the child was introduced to the robot [Beran and Ramirez-serrano 2011;Beran et al 2010]. Interestingly, researchers may leverage such principles by presenting a robot as a less-knowledgeable other, to whom the child provides caregiving behavior [Tanaka and Matsuzoe 2012] or whom they teach [de Greeff and Belpaeme 2015;Hood et al 2015].…”

Young Children’s Indiscriminate Helping Behavior Toward a Humanoid Robot

“…They help same-aged peers (Hepach et al, 2017), familiar (e.g., Tomasello, 2006, 2007;Allen et al, 2018) and unfamiliar adults (Rheingold, 1982;Hepach et al, 2016), and even recipients who had behaved antisocially (Dahl et al, 2013;Sebastián-Enesco et al, 2013;c.f., Vaish et al, 2010). Furthermore, a recent study showed that young children's helping behavior is not confined to human recipients, but extends to a robot in need (Martin et al, 2020; for a study with older children, see Beran et al, 2011). In particular, using a procedure based on research by Tomasello (2006, 2007), Martin et al (2020) presented 3-year-old children with a humanoid robot that played a xylophone and subsequently dropped the xylophone stick out of its reach.…”