When the Recipient is a Social Robot: The Impact of Negative Behavioral Valence on 5-Year-Old Children’s Sharing

By age five, children take into account a potential recipient’s characteristics when they make decisions about sharing. We tested the impact of a social robot’s positive and negative behavior on children’s sharing with the robot. Participants were 159 5-year-old children who were assigned to watch a video of the social robot showing positive behavior, a video showing negative behavior, or no video. Children’s sharing behavior was assessed in the Dictator Game paradigm, in which the children were the proposers and the social robot was the recipient. The results showed that children in the negative group shared significantly fewer stickers than those in the positive group and in the control group. The present research found that children paid attention to the behavioral valence of the social robot and made their own sharing decisions when they faced a social robot, which was a non-human entity.