Robots can influence the minds of children much more significantly than the minds of adults. This conclusion, as reported by EurekAlert !, was reached by scientists from the UK, who conducted a series of experiments with children and robots.
Children, in particular, were invited to participate in the Asch test, which was developed in the mid-twentieth century to determine the tendency to conformity.
Participants in the Asha test need to choose two strips of the same length out of the four that are shown to them. Practice shows that if a person passes the test alone, then he rarely makes mistakes, but the results change quite significantly for the worse if a group of people participates in the test.
Children who took the Asch test in a study conducted by the University of Plymouth gave the correct answer eighty-seven percent of the time. But when the kids were joined by a robot tuned to give the wrong answers, the kids started listening to the machine and the number of correct answers dropped to seventy-four percent.
Kolesnikov Andrey