Anna-Lisa Vollmer, et al, may have discovered an interesting learning opportunity while researching child-robot interactions. Here’s the abstract in Science Robotics:
People are known to change their behavior and decisions to conform to others, even for obviously incorrect facts. Because of recent developments in artificial intelligence and robotics, robots are increasingly found in human environments, and there, they form a novel social presence. It is as yet unclear whether and to what extent these social robots are able to exert pressure similar to human peers. This study used the Asch paradigm, which shows how participants conform to others while performing a visual judgment task. We first replicated the finding that adults are influenced by their peers but showed that they resist social pressure from a group of small humanoid robots. Next, we repeated the study with 7- to 9-year-old children and showed that children conform to the robots. This raises opportunities as well as concerns for the use of social robots with young and vulnerable cross-sections of society; although conforming can be beneficial, the potential for misuse and the potential impact of erroneous performance cannot be ignored.
The conformance to false conclusions is not particularly surprising, since kids are kids because they’re learning, and imitation is a very important part of learning. Indeed, you could call it a quasi-scientific exploration of a subject by going down the rat-hole and discovering what happens when you do.
The thought I’m having is to continue that exploration by connecting conformance to a false conclusion to an emphatically disastrous result, abstractly put. The goal is to teach that trust in robots can be misplaced, as they are limited by their programming, just as humans are fallible creatures. Through this approach I would hope to teach kids to think for themselves, rather than having blind belief in a robot, a person in authority, a priest – or even a God. Contradiction is not the goal, but rather critical thinking skills.
Makes me wonder if helicopter parents produce overly-credulous offspring.
