According to a study by the University of Plymouth, while adults were not swayed by robots, children were.

Kids tended to trust robots without question, and this has raised ethical issues about what happens when the machines became more pervasive, said researchers.

This means that the robotics community needs to build in safeguards for children.

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 percent on the test.

But when the robots joined them, their scores dropped to 75 percent on average. Of the wrong answers, 74 percent 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 experimented 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?

"Children increasingly yielded to social pressure exerted by a group of robots; however, adults resisted being influenced by our robots."

The researchers said that there needed to be further discussions about protective measures to "minimise the risk to children during social child-robot interaction".

Of course, it is also an opportunity. The biggest cause of people ending up on psychologist’s couches are the activities and behaviour of parents. If kids are more likely to listen to robots, it means that they are less likely to listen to their psychopathic and paranoid parents.