Equal Partners, Prioritized Lives? Preschoolers' Evaluative Patterns Toward Humans and Robots in Conventional and Moral Domains.

As social robots become increasingly integrated into children's daily lives, it remains unclear whether children apply the same normative standards to artificial agents as they do to humans. Drawing on social domain theory and a dual-process-informed distinction between categorical choice and graded appraisal, the present research examined preschoolers' binary decisions and appropriateness ratings concerning humans and robots in the conventional domain (Study 1) and the moral domain (Study 2). Two studies used a modified road-accident dilemma task. Across both studies, children's choices were strongly shaped by the behavioral valence of the sacrificial and saved targets; repeated-measures ANOVAs also suggested greater intervention in human than robot scenarios, although these agent-related choice effects were model-sensitive in LMM checks. Appropriateness ratings showed a domain-related pattern. In Study 1, ratings were comparable in human and robot scenarios, consistent with an egalitarian application of conventional standards. In Study 2, children rated saving an immoral human as more appropriate than saving an immoral robot, whereas ratings did not differ when the saved agents were moral. Because the direct cross-study interaction did not reach the conventional significance threshold, the domain contrast should be treated as suggestive rather than conclusive. These findings suggest that preschoolers may treat robots as procedural social actors in conventional contexts while granting humans greater presumed moral standing in morally consequential contexts.