A peer pressure experiment: Recreation of the Asch conformity experiment with robots

Abstract

The question put forward in this paper is whether robots can create conformity by means of group pressure. We recreate and expand on a classic social psychology experiment by Solomon Asch, so as to explore three main dimensions. First, we wanted to know whether robots can prompt conformity in human subjects, and whether there is a significant difference between the degree to which individuals conform to a group of robots as opposed to a group of humans. Secondly we ask whether group pressure (from human or robot peers) can exert influence in verbal judgments, analogously to the influence on visual judgments that is known from previous research [3], [2]. Thirdly, we investigate whether the level of conformity differs between an ambiguous situation and a non-ambiguous situation.Our results show that in both visual and verbal tasks, participants exhibit conformity with human peers, but not with robot peers. The social influence of robot peers is not a significant predictor of verbal or visual judgments in our tasks. Furthermore, the level of conformity is significantly higher in an ambiguous (unclear) situation.

Children conform, adults resist: A robot group induced peer pressure on normative social conformity

“…It appears that adults in our study did not conform to the group of robots, confirming recent studies (33). Brandstetter et al (33) used four Nao humanoid robots to investigate informational and normative social influence in adults. The robots in their experiment were individualized with outfits and played prerecorded human voices to focus on the appearance of the robots.…”

“…This replicates the classical findings of Asch (20)(21)(22) and confirms a recent study (33). The drop in judgment accuracy with human peers was present exclusively for the critical trials, suggesting that the performance drop is not due to domain general anxiety driven by the presence of peers.…”

The Influence of Robot Number on Robot Group Perception—A Call for Action

“…However, the systematic investigation of the notion of robot groups from a social psychological point of view has become a topic of scientific inquiry recently (e.g., References [11][12][13][14][15]). Previous research has explored, among other things, conformity toward robot groups [11][12][13] and the influence of robot groups on user behavior and emotions [14][15][16]. Some studies implied that mechanisms of social categorization and group perception are similar between groups of robots and humans.…”

“…Similarity should be studied, as this aspect plays a key role for group entitativity. The perception of groups of humans and groups of robots seems to differ to some extent; hence, the existing studies (e.g., References [12,15,30,31]) have built on the knowledge about human groups without scrutinizing whether these claims hold true for robots as well. Possibly, two or three robots are not sufficient in number to elicit the perception of these robots as a group; that is, they might still be perceived as individual robot prototypes, resulting in differences in user perceptions of and behavior toward these robots.…”

“…Additionally, whether a group is perceived as entitative or not influences processing of information given by the group [32,33]. Furthermore, some of the studies have used several of the same robots [12], while others have used different robots [15]. It remains unknown whether the similarity of the robots influences robot group perception: Three robots high in similarity might be perceived as a group, whereas presenting three robots low in similarity might not lead to group perception.…”