Parent Disciplining Styles to Prevent Children's Misbehaviors toward a Social Robot

In this paper we present a lab study on robot abuse by children. 61 Japanese children of ages 7-9 interacted individually with Robovie, a social robot, in a context that promoted children's free disruptive behaviors towards the robot. We compared the robot's use of an adaptation of a parental discipline strategy, the so-called love-withdrawal technique, to a similar set of robot behaviors that lacked any specific strategy (neutral condition). The main insight we gained was that perhaps we should better not focus on general robot behaviors to try to fit all children, but rather, we should adapt the robot behaviors to children's individual differences. For instance, we found that the love-withdrawal-based strategy was significantly more effective in children of age 8-9 than on children of 7.