When is it right for a robot to be wrong? Children trust a robot over a human in a selective trust task

Little is known about how children perceive, trust and learn from social robots compared to humans. The goal of this study was to compare a robot and a human agent in a selective trust task across different combinations of reliability (both reliable, only human reliable, or only robot reliable). 111 children, aged 3 to 6 years, participated in an online study where they viewed videos of a human and a robot labelling both familiar and novel objects. We found that, although children preferred to endorse a novel object label from the agent who previously labelled familiar objects correctly, when both the human and the robot were reliable they were biased more towards the robot. Their social evaluations also tended much more strongly towards a general robot preference. Children’s conceptualisations of the agents making a mistake also differed, such that an unreliable human was selected as doing things on purpose, but not an unreliable robot. These findings suggest that children’s perceptions of a robot’s reliability are separate from their evaluation of its desirability as a social interaction partner and its perceived agency. Further, they indicate that a robot making a mistake does not necessarily reduce children’s desire to interact with it as a social agent.