Study finds children are easily peer pressured by robots

It was a common assumption that children are peer pressured by their fellow friends, but turns out that kids are also being peer pressured by robots.

A new study by University of Plymouth showed that social robots, autonomous bots designed to interact with humans socially are susceptible to peer pressure children as compared to adults.

As per Futurism, two-part experiment was conducted in order to understand the impact of robot peer pressure. The first part divided 60 adult volunteers into three groups where they were all assigned the task in which they were showed four lines on a screen and asked which two matches in length.

The people in one group were required to finish the task alone where they served as the control. For the second group, the researchers asked each person to complete the task with three human ‘confederates’, people who seemed like other volunteers but are accomplices to the experimenters, who are instructed to push for the wrong answers. People in the last group completed the task along with three robot confederates.

The researchers then mixed up the order in which the confederates and volunteers responded. Around two-thirds of the time, the confederates gave the wrong answers. The team discovered that the volunteers’ accuracy for greatly worse when they were in a room with human confederates giving the wrong answers. Robot confederates did not, however, affect the volunteers’ accuracy.

In the next part, the experiment was conducted with children, dividing the 43 volunteers between the age of 7 and 9 into two groups. In one group, the children served as the control whereas, in the other one the children completed the same task with three robot confederates.

Now the researchers found that the answers of the robot confederates had a major influence on the children’s accuracy. 74% of the time children gave the wrong answer, it was word-for-word the same answer as the robots gave.

Publishing the study in the journal Science Robotics, the researchers concluded that adults are influenced by human peers, but they resist peer pressure from robot. Meanwhile, children are significantly influenced by robots and conform to their opinions, wrote Motherboard.

The team also highlighted a problem that robot peer pressure could cause as social robots become more integrated into child-rearing and early education. They can exert influence over children’s decisions and development. The team further hopes that their study will help people take protective measure to shield their children from any risks inherent to robot-child interactions.