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

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 7 and 8 and became stronger with age. Moreover, these differences translated into selective trust choices: children trusted robots with cognitive-perceptual capacities over robots with social-emotional capacities in a factual, but not a social, context, and over robots with bodily capacities across both contexts. Altogether, these findings open avenues for future interdisciplinary research on children's reasoning about emerging technologies.