Modern literature, cartoons, and films abound in stories in which a robot becomes a child’s friend. How much do children trust these “devices”? Are they affected by it?
A team of scientists from Sweden, Germany, and Australia studied the relationship between children and smart machines. The study included 111 children between the ages of 3 to 6 years. They were shown different familiar and unfamiliar objects and explained the nature of these objects. Robots and ordinary people participated in the explanation. Sometimes the explanation was correct, and sometimes completely wrong. The result was that most of the children believed what the robots said, even though they realized that their explanations sometimes did not match their existing knowledge.
The robots' errors did not reduce children's confidence in general, as they considered them random and preferred to continue communicating with them. While children were prejudiced against people's mistakes.
However, the reliability and authority of “automated tutors” was called into question last year by researchers from the University of Singapore. In their experiments, the results of which were published in the journal Child Development, preschool children, on the contrary, trusted human teachers more, even though they were deliberately provided with false information.
The experimenters assumed that the increase in trust in people was due solely to the fact that the children chose a source that was more reliable in their opinion, because they had known him for a long time. While many saw robots for the first time, but according to expectations, with the spread of “intelligent machines that resemble humans,” confidence in them will increase, as researchers point out that “children communicate with robots easily without any bias.”
Who is reliable matters.
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