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

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.