Robot Teachers for Children? Young Children Trust Robots Depending on Their Perceived Accuracy and Agency

Children acquire extensive knowledge from others. Today, children receive information from not only people but also technological devices, like social robots. Two studies assessed whether young children appropriately trust technological informants. One hundred and four 3-year-olds learned the names of novel objects from either a pair of social robots or inanimate machines, where 1 informant was previously shown to be accurate and the other inaccurate. Children trusted information from an accurate social robot over an inaccurate one, as they have been shown to do for human informants, and even more so when they perceived the robots as having psychological agency. However, children did not learn selectively from inanimate, but accurate, machines. Children can learn from technological devices (e.g., social robots) but trust their information more when the device appears to have mindful agency.