Children are interacting with robots in sophisticated ways to the extent in which they may be establishing a relationship. Forming appropriate levels of connection between children and robots could have significant impacts on the future of robot design, particularly in education. Despite this, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of such formation. In this work, we take an initial step by exploring what robot behaviors build a child-robot connection in a single interaction. Specifically, we investigated whether 6-10-year-old children feel more connected to a robot that responds to an issue by asking the child for help or simply disclosing the issue, and whether this is dependent on the valence of the response to the issue (emotional or mechanical). In a 2 x 2 between-subjects study (N=100), we found that children of all ages trusted a robot that asked for help more than a robot that simply disclosed the issue. Furthermore, children felt closer to an emotional robot that asked for help than an emotional robot that did not ask for help. Together, these findings suggest that asking for help builds trust between a robot and child and expressing relatable vulnerability, via emotional help requests, creates further feelings of connection.

Mistakes, failures, and transgressions committed by a robot are inevitable as robots become more involved in our society. When a wrong behavior occurs, it is important to understand what factors might affect how the robot is perceived by people. In this paper, we investigated how the type of transgressor (human or robot) and type of backstory depicting the transgressor's mental capabilities (default, physio-emotional, socio-emotional, or cognitive) shaped participants' perceptions of the transgressor's morality. We performed an online, between-subjects study in which participants (N =720) were first intro-duced to the transgressor and its backstory, and then viewed a video of a real-life robot or human pushing down a human. Although participants attributed similarly high intent to both the robot and the human, the human was generally perceived to have higher morality than the robot. However, the backstory that was told about the transgressors' capabilities affected their perceived morality. We found that robots with emotional backstories (i.e., physio-emotional or socio-emotional) had higher perceived moral knowledge, emotional knowledge, and desire than other robots. We also found that humans with cognitive backstories were perceived with less emotional and moral knowledge than other humans. Our findings have consequences for robot ethics and robot design for HRI.