Results

Children’s confidence was assessed by examining their subsequent willingness to accept new object labels provided by the same interlocutor.

• It turns out that children, regardless of their age, are ready to receive information from both humans and robots, as long as they do not lie.
• At the same time, preschoolers in the younger age group are more willing to repeatedly believe a person, even if he lies, but if the robot is deceiving, then there is no longer any trust in him.
• But the children in the older group did not believe in both the job and the person to the same extent if they were deceived.

We believe that this selectivity in social learning reflects young children’s increasing understanding of what a reliable source of information is. The study will provide insight into the development of trust and social learning among children growing up around a variety of sources of information, including social workers.
– explained Li Xiaoqian, a researcher from the Singapore University of Technology and Design.

The results show rapid changes in the development of children who rely on characteristics of interlocutors to decide who to trust. Understanding such subtleties is necessary in our digital age, where children are exposed to huge amounts of information on the Internet, some of it unverified and increasingly generated by artificial intelligence. The ability to evaluate the reliability of a source becomes an important skill in the development of critical thinking.