3-140 - Growing up with smart social robots: Animacy, mind, and morality

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

“Social” and “intelligent” robotic technologies are rapidly becoming a part of modern life, acting as personal assistants, tutors, medical providers, playmates, and companions. The artificial intelligence in these systems continues to advance, raising important conceptual questions (e.g., could a robot be conscious?), moral questions (e.g., is an autonomous vehicle "to blame" for an accident?), and practical questions (e.g., how should we design social robots to improve children’s lives?).

This symposium focuses on such questions from the perspective of the children growing up in this new era of artificial intelligence. We explore children’s understanding of robots’ mental capacities, social roles, and moral standing, and how those beliefs shape human–robot interactions across development.

The first talk documents that, unlike adults, young children attribute many emotional and perceptual experiences to robots, even though (like adults) they understand that robots do not have the physiological experiences that are central to biological animacy (e.g., hunger). The second talk explores changes in children’s beliefs, from early childhood through adolescence, about robots’ cognitive and perceptual abilities, and shows how these changes influence children’s feelings toward, comfort with, and willingness to learn from robots. The final talk, on moral reasoning about robots from childhood through adulthood, argues for the emergence of a new ontological category in social-moral reasoning: entities that share qualities with humans, animals, and artifacts but are not reducible to these categories. The symposium concludes with a discussion led by an expert on cognitive development, categorization, and children’s developing understanding of animacy, minds, and morality.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Kara Weisman, Stanford University

Discussant

• Susan A Gelman, University of Michigan

Individual Presentations

• Can robots feel hunger, think, and love? Children's and adults' beliefs about mental capacities - Presenting Author: Kara Weisman, Stanford University; Ellen Markman, Stanford University; Carol S Dweck, Stanford University

• Trust and the Uncanny Valley: Children’s Beliefs About Robots Affect How They Feel About Them - Presenting Author: Kimberly A. Brink, University of Michigan; Henry Wellman, University of Michigan; Kurt Gray, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Moral Relationships with Social Robots, and the Construction of a New Ontological Category - Presenting Author: Peter H Kahn, University of Washington