Eden Eisenbeis
Research Mentor: Lauren Girouard
Mentor Department: Psychology, LSA
Author(s): Eden Eisenbeis, Lauren Girouard
Session: Session 2 (10:00 AM – 10:50 AM)
Presentation Type: Poster 52
Abstract
Chatbots have become increasingly more implemented into children’s daily lives, especially in academia and entertainment (Movahed & Martin, 2025). Social presence can be described as intimacy, sociability, and warmth expressed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) has shown a positive correlation with building rapport and trust with the user (Ng & Zhang, 2025). This perspective positively correlates with a child’s acceptance rate of AI presented information (Xu et al., 2024). However, little research has been conducted on what kinds of explanations children give when choosing to trust a chatbot, grownup, or doctor for questions about their health. This current study examines why 7- to 14-year old children put their trust in either chatbots, grownups, or doctors about health-related questions by examining themes in their justification responses.
