When the Recipient is a Social Robot: The Impact of Negative Behavioral Valence on 5-Year-Old Children’s Sharing

Abstract

By age five, children take into account a potential recipient’s characteristics when they make decisions about sharing. We tested the impact of a social robot’s positive and negative behavior on children’s sharing with the robot. Participants were 159 5-year-old children who were assigned to watch a video of the social robot showing positive behavior, a video showing negative behavior, or no video. Children’s sharing behavior was assessed in the Dictator Game paradigm, in which the children were the proposers and the social robot was the recipient. The results showed that children in the negative group shared significantly fewer stickers than those in the positive group and in the control group. The present research found that children paid attention to the behavioral valence of the social robot and made their own sharing decisions when they faced a social robot, which was a non-human entity.

Keywords:

• Social robots
• sharing behavior
• behavioral valence
• Dictator Game

Acknowledgments

We sincerely thank the children who participated in this experiment, and the Kindergarten of Central China Normal University for providing the experimental site for this study. We thank Zhuoran Zhang, Haoxue Yu, Lihanjing Wu, and Ting Zhang for providing detailed suggestions for revising the manuscript. We would also like to thank Qianxi Jia, Hongxia Chen, and Luyao Hao for their assistance during the experiment.

Ethical approval

The research was conducted in accordance with the ethical guidelines of the American Psychological Association.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Degrees of freedom is the number of joints that the robot mechanism can independently move, reflecting the flexibility of the robot’s actions.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by National Social Science Fund of China General Project in Education entitled “The Study of the Effect of Social Robot on Children’s Prosocial Behavior and Its Intervention” (No. BBA220195).

Notes on contributors

Yi Pang

Yi Pang is a master’s degree candidate in the School of Education at Central China Normal University. Her research focuses on the human-robot interaction and the role of social robots in early childhood education.

Hui Li

Hui Li is an Associate Professor at the School of Education at Central China Normal University. Her current research is primarily focused on the effect of social robots and children’s prosocial behavior.