EAGER: Designing Personified Technologies to Account for Children's Social and Moral Development

拟人化技术旨在使用高度社会化的行为和类似人类的个性特征与人交流信息和互动。 虽然与拟人化技术的互动在儿童的日常体验中越来越普遍，但人们对这种互动对儿童的影响知之甚少。的社会和道德发展。 在这个探索性项目中，PI的目标是通过调查技术的社会特征（例如，对儿童社会道德观念建构的影响。 儿童与技术互动的经验似乎超出了工具使用的简单概念，包括情感联系，社会支持和道德判断，这表明一个高度复杂和互动的现象。 这项研究将采取第一步的指导框架，旨在更好地考虑儿童与技术的多方面关系的发展，并在这样做，将提供深入了解设计的影响。 虽然这种方法在社会科学中很常见，但很少有人尝试开发有用的，具有启发性的理论框架来指导（儿童）技术的设计。 项目成果将包括支持儿童社会和道德发展的拟人化技术实例、为成人和儿童技术的长期发展提供信息的强有力的设计建议，以及增加关于儿童对技术的社会和道德概念的跨学科知识。孩子们在一个由社会实体、自然现象、人工制品和信息系统组成的复杂世界中航行。 与具身的、具有社会智能的、自主的实体频繁互动的潜在后果是什么？这些实体表现出生物运动、社会优雅、沟通能力和明显的意向性等特征。 孩子们会开始将这些技术概念化为在世界上具有道德地位的实体吗？ 技术识别和回应道德互动环境的能力是否会导致特定类型的社会和道德归因？ 该项目将为诸如此类的问题提供初步答案。 这项工作的研究成果和设计建议将影响儿童在教育、娱乐、治疗和照顾等不同应用领域的拟人化技术的设计。 PI将向学术界和技术设计界传播项目成果，并将与行业中的游戏设计师合作，将研究结果直接应用于现成的市场产品。

Personified technologies are designed to communicate information and interact with people using a repertoire of highly social behaviors and human-like personality traits. Although interactions with personified technologies are increasingly common in children's everyday experience, little is known about the implications of such interactions for children?s social and moral development. In this exploratory project the PI's goal is to seek rigorous empirical evidence to support the design of personified technologies for children, by investigating the influence of social features of the technology (e.g., apparent race) on children's construction of social and moral concepts. Children's experiences in interacting with technologies appear to extend beyond a simple notion of tool use, to include emotional connection, social support, and moral judgments which suggest a highly complex and interactive phenomenon. This research will take first steps toward the development of a guiding framework that is intended to better account for children's multifaceted relationships with technology and, in so doing, will provide insight into implications for design. Though such approaches are common in the social sciences, few attempts have been made to develop useful, empirically-informed theoretical frames to guide the design of (children's) technology. Project outcomes will include examples of personified technologies that support children's social and moral development, robust design recommendations that can inform the long-term development of technologies for adults and children alike, and increased interdisciplinary knowledge about children's social and moral conceptions of technology.Broader Impacts: Children navigate a complex world of social entities, natural phenomena, constructed artifacts, and information systems. What are the potential consequences of frequent interaction with embodied, socially intelligent, autonomous entities that exhibit characteristics such as biological motion, social grace, communicative ability, and apparent intentionality? Will children begin to conceptualize these technologies as entities that have moral standing in the world? Does the ability of the technology to recognize and respond to morally-charged contexts of interaction lead to specific types of social and moral attributions? This project will provide first answers to questions such as these. Research outcomes and the design recommendations that result from this work will impact the design of personified technologies for children in diverse application domains such as education, entertainment, therapy, and caretaking. The PI will disseminate project outcomes to the scholarly and technology design communities, and will work with game designers in industry to apply the findings directly to off-the-shelf market products.