Why Do Children Abuse Robots?
Abstract
We found that children sometimes abuse a social robot in a hallway of a shopping mall. They spoke bad words, repeatedly obstructed the robot's path, and sometimes even kicked and punched the robot. To investigate why they abused it, we conducted a field study, in which we let visiting children freely interact with the robot, and interviewed when they engaged in a serious abusive behavior including physical contacts. In total, we obtained valid interviews from twenty-three children over 13 days of observations. They are aged between five and nine. Adults and older children were rarely involved. We interviewed them to know whether they perceived the robot as human-like others, why they abused it, and whether they thought that the robot would suffer from their abusive behavior. We found that 1) the majority of the children abused because they were curious about the robot's reactions or enjoyed abusing it while considering it as human-like, and 2) about half of the children believed in the capability of the robot to perceive their abusive behaviors.
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Self-directed engagement with GenAI presents risks related to privacy, safety, and ethical considerations and may influence children's cognitive and social development in complex ways.
“it also presents risks related to privacy, safety, and ethical considerations and may influence children's cognitive and social development in complex ways [8,34,38,41].”
From Child-AI Co-Creation: A Review of the Current Research Landscape and a Proposal for Six Design Considerations (2025) · cites this paper as [38]
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- Authors
- Nomura, T., Uratani, T., Kanda, T., Matsumoto, K., Kidokoro, H., Suehiro, Y., & Yamada, S.
- Affiliations
- Ryukoku University (JP)
- Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (JP)
- Tokai University (JP)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction Extended Abstracts
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2015-03-02
- Pages
- 63-64
- OpenAlex
- W2147669981
- Cited by
- 58
- References
- 6
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 3
- FWCI
- 7.03
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › AI in Service Interactions
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Keywords
- social robots, human-robot interaction, children's perceptions of robots, anthropomorphism
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