Children are more trusting of robots than adults but this is not in the least surprising

Those taking part in the study completed a simple test, known as the Asch paradigm, which involved finding two lines that matched in length. Known as the conformity experiment, the test has historically found that people tend to agree with their peers even if individually they have given a different answer. In this case, the peers were robots. When children aged seven to nine were alone in the room, they scored an average of 87% on the test. But when the robots joined them, their scores dropped to 75% on average. Of the wrong answers, 74% matched those of the robots.

Professor of robotics, Tony Belpaeme, who led the research, said: "People often follow the opinions of others and we've known for a long time that it is hard to resist taking over views and opinions of people around us. We know this as conformity. But as robots will soon be found in the home and the workplace, we were wondering if people would conform to robots."

"What our results show is that adults do not conform to what the robots are saying. But when we did the experiment with children, they did. It shows children can perhaps have more of an affinity with robots than adults, which does pose the question: what if robots were to suggest, for example, what products to buy or what to think? The conclusion? Children increasingly yielded to social pressure exerted by a group of robots; however, adults resisted being influenced by our robots."

This is completely unsurprising, because children are more trusting of information in general. They're much more aware of their own ignorance, even if unconsciously - they'll believe anything you put in front of 'em. This isn't because they're wonderful, natural-born scientists/philosophers/artists (... which the system grinds out of us, yatta yatta yatta...) or anything daft like that. It's because if they didn't listen to expert advice, they'd quickly end up swallowing forks and hitting themselves with shoes and so on. Expert, in this context, is basically anyone who isn't a child.

Adults are more rationally skeptical. It makes a lot of sense to be distrustful of new information if you've made it to 35 without eating parasite-laden slugs, and you already know that eating slugs is a terrible idea. No robot or textbook or cartoon show is going to have an easy time convincing you of that. That said, it would be interesting to see if robots (which are interactive and therefore more "personal" to some extent) are more successful at persuading children than other media. Robots are more human, but books might be viewed as more authoritative.

The really interesting question for me is at what point the anarchic flexibility of a child's mind gives way to the stabler level of adult cognition, and whether this dominates later beliefs or if these are largely set at an earlier stage of development. It's easy to convince kids of anything, but for this reason it's harder to get them to keep those ideas. I'm inclined to go for early adolescence. I reckon you can pretty easily change a child's mind about anything up until that point, so it's then you ought to teach them whatever you want them to retain - moral values and so on. Of course that's not to say you can convince anyone of anything by the same methods, since personality seems to have a strong (even dominant) genetic component.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45183049