Original title: Social priming enhances young children's trust in robots
Margherita Magnini, Diane Poulin-Dubois, Elizabeth J Goldman, Andrea Luna Tacci +5 · August 2026
Do young children trust a robot or a person when learning new words? Researchers showed children a helpful robot that named familiar objects correctly and a human who got them wrong. Then, both speakers gave made-up names to unfamiliar objects to see which teacher children believed. When three-year-olds watched without any extra help, they trusted both speakers equally. Five-year-olds trusted the accurate robot instead of the mistaken human. Next, researchers showed a new group a video highlighting the robot's social side before the word-learning test. This social push changed things: now, both three-year-olds and five-year-olds preferred to learn new words from the robot. By age 5, children easily trust whoever proves they know the answers, whether that teacher is a machine or a human. Younger kids, however, need to see a robot acting friendly and social before they rely on it for facts.
Imagine you are at a new playground. One child always correctly names the playground equipment; another child often gets it wrong. Now a new piece of equipment appears. You might trust the accurate child—unless the inaccurate child seems really friendly. The problem is that friendliness can override accuracy. In this paper, the robot is the accurate child and the human makes mistakes. A short video makes the robot seem friendlier, which shifts younger children's trust towards the robot.
As robots enter classrooms and homes, understanding how children decide whether to trust them is essential. This study shows that even brief social cues can make young children view a robot as a reliable source of information. That could help design better learning tools—but also raises questions about children's vulnerability to misleading social signals from machines.
The abstract does not discuss limitations directly. The study focuses on a specific task (word learning), specific ages (3 and 5), and a specific robot (NAO). It does not test whether the trust effect lasts over time, generalizes to other tasks, or how children would respond if the human informant were also competent.
Ask anything about this paper. Answers come from its abstract, and say so when the abstract doesn't cover your question.
Social priming enhances young children's trust in robots — Margherita Magnini, Diane Poulin-Dubois, Elizabeth J Goldman et al. — Journal of experimental child psychology — doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2026.106618
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.