The next best friend? How children perceive and relate to a social robot

In the future, children will increasingly be exposed to social robots, or robots made for interactions with people. Given children’s tendency to relate socially to the world around them, the emergence of social relationships between children and robots may thus become increasingly common. While scholars have expressed both hopes and concerns about the development of such relationships, research on child-robot relationship formation is still in its infancy. To advance knowledge on the topic, this dissertation presents, first, a literature review on child-robot relationship formation and three self-report scales that measure children’s closeness toward, trust in, and perceived social support from a social robot. Second, the dissertation reports on three experimental studies that investigate how a) transparency about social robots’ technological nature and lack of humanlike capacities and b) a social robot’s use of communicative processes that facilitate the emergence of interpersonal relationships affect children’s perception of, and relationship formation with, a social robot. The findings indicate that transparency can, to some extent, change how children perceive and relate to a social robot, without preventing the emergence of child-robot relationships altogether. In addition, it appears that communicative processes central to interpersonal relationship formation may not always have similar effects on the emergence of social relationships between children and social robots. These findings are discussed in light of the desirability and implications of this new type of relationship and the presentation of social robots to children as (seemingly) humanlike entities.