Obedience to robot. Humanoid robot as an experimenter in Milgram paradigm

Abstract

Humans will increasingly be influenced by social robots. It still seems unclear whether we will accept them as authorities and whether we will give in to them without reflection, as in the case of human authorities in the classic Stanley Milgram experiments (1963, 1965, and 1974). The demonstration by Stanley Milgram of the prevailing tendency in people to display extreme obedience to authority figures was one of the most important discoveries in the field of social psychology. The authors of this article decided to use a modified Milgram's research paradigm (obedience lite procedure) to compare one's obedience to a person giving instructions to electrocute someone sitting in an adjacent room with obedience to a robot issuing similar instructions. Twenty individuals were tested in both cases. As it turned out, the level of obedience was very high in both situations, and the nature of the authority figure issuing instructions (a professor vs. a robot) did not have the impact on the reactions of the subjects.