The Minds That Matter: How Robots' Mental Capacities Shape Children's Evaluations and Trust.

ABSTRACT: Robots express a great deal of diverse human-like capacities, ranging from communicating in natural languages to displaying emotions to responding to physical touch. Here we examined the role of different kinds of mental capacities on children's evaluations of, and trust in, robots. We presented 6- to 9-year-olds with identical-looking humanoid robots described as having one (or none) of the following capacities: cognitive-perceptual, social-emotional, or physiological. Across three studies (N = 287), we found that children differentially evaluated (Studies 1A and 1B) and selectively trusted (Study 2) robots with different types of minds. The diverging evaluations (i.e., of benevolence, intelligence, affinity, and epistemic appeal) of robots with different minds emerged between ages

SUBMITTER: Grigoreva Crean AD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12543304 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature