Kids prefer to learn from a competent robot rather than an incompetent human

BOSTON – A new study finds kids would prefer to learn from a competent robot rather than an incompetent human.

Canadian researchers wanted to see whether young children could consider a robot a better teacher than a human. 

They had 3 to 5-year-olds children over Zoom watch a video of a young woman and a small robot sitting side by side with a variety of simple objects between them. 

The robot would label the objects correctly while the human would get them wrong, for example calling a car a book or a cup a dog. 

Then when the robot and the human labeled unfamiliar objects with nonsense terms, the 5-year-olds were more likely to believe the robot over the human, showing that by age five, children will choose to learn from a more competent teacher even if that teacher is a mechanical robot rather than a person.