Exploring the Application of Social Robots in Understanding Bullying Perpetrators

This paper examines a novel approach to the problem of bullying by employing Child-Robot Interaction to attempt to understand the causes of perpetrators behaviour. A comparative study was undertaken to understand the efficacy of such an approach. Children aged 9–10 years were first identified on the basis of their bullying perpetration record and characteristics. Half the children were made to interact individually with a social robot and the other half with a human agent over the span of 3 weeks. Our results exhibit that while children opened up to both kinds of agents, interaction with the human agent led to more insightful conversations that enhanced understanding of causes for the perpetrator’s behaviour. As expected, the interactions varied from child to child and are to be considered on an individual basis. This is an ongoing study and shall be later extended to employ a hybrid of a within-subject and an in-between subject approach in order to examine the experience of each child individually and holistically.

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