When it is ok to give the Robot Less

Children’s Fairness Intuitions Towards Robots

Bibliographic Data

ID21199136
AuthorsOshrat Ayalon (0000-0002-5905-9838, Tel Aviv University, corresponding author), Hannah Hok (0000-0003-2902-4201, University of Chicago), Alex Shaw (0000-0002-8852-0179, University of Chicago), Goren Gordon (0000-0002-8351-7034, Tel Aviv University)
Year2023
Volume15
Issue9-10
Pages1581-1601
Publication date2023-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Journal of Social Robotics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1875-4791 • E-ISSN: 1875-4805
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s12369-023-01047-4
OpenAlexW4386896824
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited89

Children develop intuitions about fairness relatively early in development. While we know that children believe other humans care about distributional fairness, considerably less is known about whether they believe other agents, such as robots, do as well. In two experiments (N = 273) we investigated 4- to 9-year-old children’s intuitions about whether robots would be upset about unfair treatment as human children. Children were told about a scenario in which resources were being split between a human child and a target recipient: either another child or a robot across two conditions. The target recipient (either child or robot) received less than another child. They were then asked to evaluate how fair the distribution was, and whether the target recipient would be upset. Both Experiment 1 and 2 used the same design, but Experiment 2 also included a video demonstrating the robot’s mechanistic “robotic” movements. Our results show that children thought it was more fair to share unequally when the disadvantaged recipient was a robot rather than a child (Experiment 1 and 2). Furthermore, children thought that the child would be more upset than the robot (Experiment 2). Finally, we found that this tendency to treat these two conditions differently became stronger with age (Experiment 2). These results suggest that young children treat robots and children similarly in resource allocation tasks, but increasingly differentiate them with age. Specifically, children evaluate inequality as less unfair when the target recipient is a robot, and think that robots will be less angry about inequality

Cognitive psychology · Developmental psychology · Disadvantaged · Political science · Robot · Robotics · Child and Animal Learning Development · Computer Science · Law · Psychology · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment · Social Psychology · Artificial Intelligence

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