Do young children trust a robot the way they trust a person?
Children trusted a robot about as readily as a person overall, but the youngest favoured the human while seven-year-olds favoured the robot once theory of mind was accounted for.
Source
Shall I Trust You? From Child-Robot Interaction to Trusting Relationships
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Each child played a guessing-based Trusting Game once with a human and once with the NAO robot (order counterbalanced), across four age groups; trust was related to theory of mind, attachment and switching tasks.
- N
- N=94 · 94 Italian children recruited (22 three-year-olds, 24 five-year-olds, 25 seven-year-olds, 23 nine-year-olds); a few children with a missing session were dropped from analyses.
- Population
- Italian preschool and primary-school children aged 3 to 9 from Milan-area schools
- Outcome
- Number of trials before the child followed (trust), stopped following (mistrust) and again followed (restored trust) the partner's guesses; attributions of mental states to human and robot
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Children aged 3, 5, 7 and 9 played a 'guess where the doll is' game with either an adult experimenter or the humanoid robot NAO, and later with the other partner. The partner always guessed first; the game was rigged so the partner was first always right (trust acquisition), then always wrong (trust loss), then right again (trust restoration), and the researchers counted how many trials the child took to switch behaviour. Children also completed false-belief (theory of mind) tasks, an attachment-representation task, a response-switching task and a questionnaire on what mental states humans and robots have.
What they found
Children's tendency to trust dropped across the game, being lowest in the restoration phase, and 3-year-olds were more trusting than every older group. Partner type had no effect on its own, but once first-order theory of mind was controlled, 3-year-olds trusted the human more while 7-year-olds trusted the robot more. Better theory of mind went with more cautious trust, more secure attachment went with more trust (mostly with the human and in the youngest children), and even 3-year-olds credited the human with more perception and knowledge than the robot.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Groups were small (roughly twenty-odd children per age), all from a few schools in one Italian region, and the authors themselves call for a larger, longitudinal sample. The age comparisons are cross-sectional, and the links with attachment, theory of mind and switching are many separate correlations run without correction across subgroups, so some may be chance findings. The robot versus human difference only appeared after adding theory of mind as a covariate, and the game involved pure guessing rather than a partner with real knowledge, so it may not generalise to trust in informative robots such as tutors.
Key terms
- Theory of mind (ToM)
- The ability to understand that others have beliefs and knowledge that can differ from reality or from your own; tested here with false-belief stories.
- False-belief task
- A story task in which a character holds a mistaken belief; answering where the character will look shows whether the child represents that belief.
- Trust restoration
- Re-establishing reliance on a partner after that partner has proved unreliable; the third phase of the game.
- Selective trust
- Children's tendency to rely on informants who have been accurate before rather than on everyone equally.
- Attribution of mental states
- Judging whether an agent can perceive, feel, want, imagine or know things; used to compare how children think about humans and robots.
Flashcards
0 of 12 answers reviewed
Research intelligence for this paper
See its role on concept claims, tensions it is part of, placement history, and related discoveries.
Quiz yourself
What did the Trusting Game's dependent variable count?
Common questions
How did the researchers measure trust without asking children directly?
They counted behaviour: how many rounds passed before the child started copying the partner's guess three times in a row, or stopped copying it three times in a row.
Why would better theory of mind make children trust less?
A child who understands minds realises the partner cannot see where the doll is hidden either, so the partner's past successes are luck and should not be blindly followed.
Does this mean robots are more trustworthy for children than people?
No. Overall trust did not differ by partner; the robot advantage was limited to 7-year-olds after statistical adjustment and came from one guessing game.
More on Social cognition