Young Children’s Indiscriminate Helping Behavior Toward a Humanoid Robot

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.