Human-Robot Friendship (HRF) Procedure with Children

Intergroup contact theory posits that a positive encounter with a member of another social group (i.e., outgroup) can improve the individual's attitudes toward the entire outgroup [3] and even non-contacted outgroups [34]. The current study applies the human-robot friendship (HRF) procedure [5] to children in early (N = 68) and middle childhood (N = 60), to investigate how a brief, positive contact with a social robot affects their perceptions of robots and other human outgroups. The HRF procedure indeed improved attitudes toward social robots in both age groups. However, the attitude improvement did not extend to non-contacted secondary outgroups and even showed a reverse pattern among young children. This study is among the first developmental research to experimentally demonstrate the relation between interaction with a robot and attitudes toward robots.