Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 Feb 21:11:239.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00239. eCollection 2020.

Young Children's Indiscriminate Helping Behavior Toward a Humanoid Robot

Dorothea U Martin  1 , Madeline I MacIntyre  1 , Conrad Perry  2 , Georgia Clift  1 , Sonja Pedell  3 , Jordy Kaufman  1
Affiliations

Young Children's Indiscriminate Helping Behavior Toward a Humanoid Robot

Dorothea U Martin et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Young children help others in a range of situations, relatively indiscriminate of the characteristics of those they help. Recent results have suggested that young children's helping behavior extends even to humanoid robots. However, it has been unclear how characteristics of robots would influence children's helping behavior. Considering previous findings suggesting that certain robot features influence adults' perception of and their behavior toward robots, the question arises of whether young children's behavior and perception would follow the same principles. The current study investigated whether two key characteristics of a humanoid robot (animate autonomy and friendly expressiveness) would affect children's instrumental helping behavior and their perception of the robot as an animate being. Eighty-two 3-year-old children participated in one of four experimental conditions manipulating a robot's ostensible animate autonomy (high/low) and friendly expressiveness (friendly/neutral). Helping was assessed in an out-of-reach task and animacy ratings were assessed in a post-test interview. Results suggested that both children's helping behavior, as well as their perception of the robot as animate, were unaffected by the robot's characteristics. The findings indicate that young children's helping behavior extends largely indiscriminately across two important characteristics. These results increase our understanding of the development of children's altruistic behavior and animate-inanimate distinctions. Our findings also raise important ethical questions for the field of child-robot interaction.

Keywords: altruism; animacy; child-robot interaction; helping; human-robot interaction; prosocial behavior; social robotics.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Robot control program as displayed on the tablet (top); test room set-up during the test phase (bottom).
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Percentage of children helping by condition. Error bars represent standard errors. Help was provided by n = 9 in HAAF (45%), n = 13 in HAAN (65%), n = 8 in LAAF (38%), and n = 10 in LAAN (48%).
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Mean scores and standard errors for each question by entity. Animacy scores are the means of the breathe, feel, and think scores. The animacy score of vehicles was significantly lower than the animacy scores of all other entities (each p < 0.001). The animacy score of children was significantly greater than the scores of animals, p = 0.01, and of the unfamiliar robot, p = 0.038.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Allen M., Perry C., Kaufman J. (2018). Toddlers prefer to help familiar people. J. Exp. Child Psychol. 174 90–102. 10.1016/j.jecp.2018.05.009 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Balas B., Tonsager C. (2014). Face animacy is not all in the eyes: evidence from contrast chimeras. Perception 43 355–367. 10.1068/p7696 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Bartneck C., van der Hoek M., Mubin O., Al Mahmud A. (2007). “Daisy, daisy, give me your answer do!”: Switching off a robot,” in Proceeding of the 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, (New York, NY: ), 217–222.
    1. Batki A., Baron-Cohen S., Wheelwright S., Connellan J., Ahluwalia J. (2000). Is there an innate gaze module? Evidence from human neonates. Infant Behav. Dev. 23 223–229. 10.1016/S0163-6383(01)00037-6 - DOI
    1. Beran T. N., Ramirez-Serrano A., Kuzyk R., Nugent S., Fior M. (2011). Would children help a robot in need? Int. J. Soc. Rob. 3 83–93. 10.1007/s12369-010-0074-7 - DOI

LinkOut - more resources