Based on integrative theoretical work, survey research, and multiple experiments on interactions between children and social robots, the project has produced several important results. First, advancing existing research, our studies have shown children’s acceptance of social robots is largely hedonically oriented, driven by attitudes and norms, and declining over time. Personality characteristics, anxiety toward robots, and utilitarian views of a robot do not seem to play a role. Second, shifting the dominant focus of existing research from prosocial behavior toward a robot to prosocial behavior by a robot, we demonstrated that robots, as role models, can enhance children’s prosocial behavior. Non-human actors, such as social robots, may thus have social functions that have traditionally been fulfilled by humans. Third, communicative processes such as a robot’s question asking, self-description, and self-disclosure matter for child-robot relationship formation. Transparency about a robot’s machine status – an aspect often neglected in research – reduced children’s willingness to form a relationship with it. Fourth, when we try to understand why children from relationships with robots, it is important to consider the extent to which children attribute human characteristics to robot, the degree to which children perceive robots as similar to themselves, and whether children think that robots can read their thoughts. The more children entertain these ideas when interacting with social robots, the more likely they are to form relationships with them. Finally, we demonstrated that important aspects of child-robot interaction can be assessed, even among relatively young children, with self-report measures in a reliable, valid, and efficient way. These measures are now increasingly used also by other researchers and not only contribute to improved and more standardized measurement in the field but also to more cumulative insights.
Our results have been published in academic outlets and been presented at conferences, both to academic and non-academic audiences. Although the research of the project has dealt with fundamental, basic questions, the implications of the results may be of interest to robot companies and roboticists as well as to those interested in whether and how to use robots among children.
