Who do you follow?

Abstract

Social robots gain increasing relevance in many domains with high potential for social good (e.g., healthcare, care for the elderly, robots as social companion). However, their design bears high responsibility and asks for a profound understanding of to what degree psychological mechanisms of human-human interaction (HHI) apply to human-robot interaction (HRI). The present experiment (N=40) explores this issue by replicating the famous social influence experiments by Asch [1], which showed that human judgment can be influenced by confederates against better knowledge. Our study replaced one of the confederates by a robot and revealed that a robot's influence can be even higher than that of other humans. Implications for future research are discussed.