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About

Tamar Kushnir is a leading developmental psychologist whose research sits at the intersection of cognitive development, social cognition, and human-robot interaction. Her work explores how children—and adults—reason about the minds, morals, and agency of both humans and interactive technologies. In a highly cited 2023 study (29 citations), she investigated children’s beliefs about the experiences, thoughts, and morals of familiar household technologies, revealing that young children do not uniformly attribute agency to these devices, distinguishing them from advanced humanoid robots. Her 2024 finding that school-age children are more skeptical of inaccurate robots than adults highlights the developmental trajectory of trust in technology. Kushnir’s 2020 paper “Better together” (6 citations) examines how children’s prosocial tendencies drive them to help robot collaborators who fail, provided they can infer the robot’s needs. More recently (2025), she has probed how perceived ability to feel influences moral judgments of robot transgressions. With a growing citation impact and a portfolio that bridges developmental science and AI ethics, Kushnir is shaping how we understand the next generation’s relationship with intelligent machines.