Children Give in to Robot Peer Pressure
Children Give in to Robot Peer Pressure
When kids were asked if certain lines are longer or shorter
than others, they defered to the robots' answers.
By Bill Andrews | August 15, 2018 1:00 pm
Those of us of a certain age may recall the D.A.R.E.
program wafting through our classrooms like so many puffs of smoke. In addition
to the evils of drugs and alcohol, and the importance of just saying no, the
program highlighted the power of peer pressure. No matter how much our friends
and classmates might say something’s cool, we shouldn’t be swayed if we don’t
want to try it!
It turns out that kids aren’t just susceptible to regular
old peer pressure. According to a study published Wednesday in Science
Robotics, apocalyptically titled “Children conform, adults resist,” they’re
even vulnerable to robot peer pressure. Truly, the future has arrived.
Psst — Beep Boop, Kid
Let’s be clear. These aren’t digital-only bots that have
no physical body.
In this experiment, European researchers literally sat
down 43 children (ages 7 to 9), one at a time, at a table with three “small
humanoid robots.” They asked the kids, and robots, to answer visual questions —
“Which of these lines is the same length as that one?” — and when the robots
all gave a wrong answer, the kids would too. The authors say the children were
“significantly influenced” by their robot peers,” and 74 percent of the kids’
wrong answers were actually the same wrong answer as the robots, word for word.
(The paper actually refers to the robots as confederates,
since they’re secretly collaborating with the researchers. It’s the typical
language for this type of social test, but does nothing to quell the research’s
unsettling vibes.)
The researchers also tested 60 adults, but they fared
much better against the robots. “Adults do not appear to normatively conform to
the humanoid robots used in the study,” they wrote, seemingly wistfully.
Adults did succumb to regular peer pressure, from other adult
humans, so at least we know the test was valid for them. Since it’s harder to
test children, the researchers pit them against robots only, and not human
peers. In all cases, when the robots gave the right answers, so did the test
subjects, so we can’t just blame the kids’ robot-peer sensitivity to a
particularly weird day at school.
Our Robots, Ourselves
It might all sound silly (and I didn’t even mention that
the robots were “individualized with outfits”!), but this is actually sound and
important research. The researchers point out that social robots already exist
in such capacities as museum tour guides, therapeutic aids in elder facilities
and even early childhood education, with robotic teaching aids already visiting
classrooms.
The paper highlights an idea that researchers call the
“computers as social actors” hypothesis. It suggests people will “naturally and
unconsciously treat computers and other forms of media in a manner that is
fundamentally social, attributing human-like qualities to technology.” But we
still don’t know too much about just how far it extends.
By determining that adults don’t conform to robot peer
pressure, but kids do, the researchers have shown it’s possible to manipulate
children with these robots, either inadvertently or maliciously.
“A future in which autonomous social robots are used as
aids for education professionals or child therapists is not distant,” the
authors write. In other words, the robots are coming — our kids should be ready
for them, and confident in their ability to just say no.
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