Growing Growth Mindset with a Social Robot Peer

Abstract

Mindset has been shown to have a large impact on people’s academic, social, and work achievements. A growth mindset, i.e., the belief that success comes from effort and perseverance, is a better indicator of higher achievements as compared to a fixed mindset, i.e., the belief that things are set and cannot be changed. Interventions aimed at promoting a growth mindset in children range from teaching about the brain’s ability to learn and change, to playing computer games that grant brain points for effort rather than success. This work explores a novel paradigm to foster a growth mindset in young children where they play a puzzle solving game with a peer-like social robot. The social robot is fully autonomous and programmed with behaviors suggestive of it having either a growth mindset or a neutral mindset as it plays puzzle games with the child. We measure the mindset of children before and after interacting with the peer-like robot, in addition to measuring their problem solving behavior when faced with a challenging puzzle. We found that children who played with a growth mindset robot 1) self-reported having a stronger growth mindset and 2) tried harder during a challenging task, as compared to children who played with the neutral mindset robot. These results suggest that interacting with peer-like social robot with a growth mindset can promote the same mindset in children.

A Long-Term Study of Young Children's Rapport, Social Emulation, and Language Learning With a Peer-Like Robot Playmate in Preschool

“…Kory-Westlund (2019) found that children's language emulation, positive emotion, and acceptance of the robot were positively affected by the robot's use of speech entrainment and an appropriate backstory about its abilities. These studies suggest that children's rapport may be reflected in their language emulation, a result that jibes with related work showing that humans who have greater rapport with each other will mimic each other's language (e.g., Niederhoffer and Pennebaker, 2002;Pennebaker et al, 2003;Huttenlocher et al, 2004;Tausczik and Pennebaker, 2010;Ireland et al, 2011;Babcock et al, 2014) and vocal prosody (e.g., Porzel et al, 2006;Reitter et al, 2011;Borrie and Liss, 2014) more.…”

Empathic Robot for Group Learning

“…Another study focused on fostering children to develop a growing mindset as part of social and emotional training [Park et al 2017b]. Therefore, in a scenario featuring a child playing puzzle games with a robot, a fully autonomous robot was built with the capability to exhibit "behaviors suggestive of it having either a growth mindset or a neutral mindset" [Park et al 2017b]. The results of a study that compared two types of robots in the same scenario have shown that children who played with a growth mindset robot self-reported having a stronger growth mindset and tried harder during the task.…”

Measuring young children's long-term relationships with social robots

“…Furthermore, in long-term interactions, social robots are taking on a relational role-i.e., they are situated as agents that actively attempt to build and maintain longterm social-emotional relationships [4]. They are introduced as peers, tutors, and learning companions [21,37,41,43]. While children's relationships with robots may not be like the relationships they have with their parents, pets, imaginary friends, or smart devices, they will form relationships of some kind, and as such, we need to find ways to characterize and measure these relationships.…”