Robots Can Successfully Peer Pressure Children

Paul Bellow · Aug 27, 2018

This might make an interesting novel. Robots want to take over the world, so they begin to brainwash children at a young age. How many generations would it take for them to have complete control of the world?

We’ve all been warned of the dangers of peer pressure: coaxing unsuspecting children into drinking, drugs, sex, and other questionable behaviors. Apparently, not only can human peers convince children to make bad decisions, social robots can too (though adult subjects remained immune), according to a new study by Bielefeld University researcher Anna-Lisa Vollmer published in the journal Science Robotics.

To conduct the study, researchers created three groups of adult volunteers, all assigned the same task: to estimate the length of a target line based on three other lines. In the control group, the volunteers were asked to complete the task alone. Another group went at the task with a group of human “confederates,” undercover researchers tasked to sway the humans’ decisions, and the last group worked with robot “confederates:” three humanoid robots “individualized with outfits.”

Researchers discovered that for adults, volunteers’ accuracy dropped when in a room with human confederates, while the robot confederates didn’t seem to make a difference. When they repeated the experiment with children between seven to nine years old, however, the children were heavily influenced by the robots. In fact, 74 percent of the time children gave the wrong answer, they gave the same answer as the robot, word for word. When the robots gave the right answers, the kids did too.
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Robots Can Successfully Peer Pressure Children

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Robots Can Successfully Peer Pressure Children

Paul Bellow Forum Game Master Staff Member LitRPG Author Shop Owner Citizen Aspiring Writer

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