Children conform, adults resist: A robot group induced peer pressure on normative social conformity.

People are known to change their behavior and decisions to conform to others, even for obviously incorrect facts. Because of recent developments in artificial intelligence and robotics, robots are increasingly found in human environments, and there, they form a novel social presence. It is as yet unclear whether and to what extent these social robots are able to exert pressure similar to human peers. This study used the Asch paradigm, which shows how participants conform to others while performing a visual judgment task. We first replicated the finding that adults are influenced by their peers but showed that they resist social pressure from a group of small humanoid robots. Next, we repeated the study with 7- to 9-year-old children and showed that children conform to the robots. This raises opportunities as well as concerns for the use of social robots with young and vulnerable cross-sections of society; although conforming can be beneficial, the potential for misuse and the potential impact of erroneous performance cannot be ignored.

Robot education peers in a situated primary school study: Personalisation promotes child learning.

The benefit of social robots to support child learning in an educational context over an extended period of time is evaluated. Specifically, the effect of personalisation and adaptation of robot social behaviour is assessed. Two autonomous robots were embedded within two matched classrooms of a primary school for a continuous two week period without experimenter supervision to act as learning companions for the children for familiar and novel subjects. Results suggest that while children in both personalised and non-personalised conditions learned, there was increased child learning of a novel subject exhibited when interacting with a robot that personalised its behaviours, with indications that this benefit extended to other class-based performance. Additional evidence was obtained suggesting that there is increased acceptance of the personalised robot peer over a non-personalised version. These results provide the first evidence in support of peer-robot behavioural personalisation having a positive influence on learning when embedded in a learning environment for an extended period of time.

Local health department and academic institution linkages for community health assessment and improvement processes: a national overview and local case study.

Community health improvement processes that yield community health assessments (CHAs) and community health improvement plans (CHIPs) provide data and a process to determine key community priorities and take action and are ideally collaborative endeavors. Nationally, increased focus on CHAs and CHIPs highlights the role that Academic Health Departments or other local health department (LHD)-academic linkages can play in completing CHAs and CHIPs. Drawn from the experiences of 5 LHD-academic partnerships that participated in a national demonstration and a detailed account of the experience of one, this article presents how such linkages can support CHA and CHIP work, ways to anticipate and overcome challenges, and the tangible benefits that may be realized for both the LHD and the academic partner. Community health improvement processes are ripe opportunities for LHD-academic linkages and can be fruitful and mutually beneficial partnerships to be used in completing CHAs and CHIPs to measurably improve the public's health.