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Safety Blanket of Humanity: Thinking of Unfamiliar Humans or Robots Increases Conformity to Humans

Published: 01 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

As robots become prevalent, merely thinking of their existence may affect how people behave. When interacting with a robot, people conformed to the robot's answers more than to their own initial response [1]. In this study, we examined how robot affect conformity to other humans. We primed participants to think of different experiences: Humans (an experience with a human stranger), Robots (an experience with a robot), or Neutral (daily life). We then measured if participants conformed to other humans in survey answers. Results indicated that people conformed more when thinking of Humans or Robots than of Neutral events. This implies that robots have a similar effect on human conformity to other humans as human strangers do.

References

[1]
N. Salomons, M. van der Linden, S. Strohkorb Sebo, and B. Scassellati, "Humans conform to robots: Disambiguating trust, truth, and conformity," in Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2018, pp. 187--195.
[2]
M. R. Fraune, S. Kawakami, S. Sabanovic, R. De Silva, and M. Okada, "Three's company, or a crowd?: The effects of robot number and behavior on HRI in Japan and the USA," Robotics: Science and Systems, 2015.
[3]
D. Abrams, M. Wetherell, S. Cochrane, M. A. Hogg, and J. C. Turner, "Knowing what to think by knowing who you are: Self-categorization and the nature of norm formation, conformity and group polarization*," British Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 29, pp. 97--119, 1990.
[4]
S. E. Asch, "Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority," Psychological monographs: General and applied, vol. 70, p. 1, 1956.
[5]
R. B. Cialdini and M. R. Trost, "Social influence: Social norms, conformity and compliance," 1998.
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S. A. Haslam and S. D. Reicher, "Contesting the "nature" of conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo's studies really show," PLoS biology, vol. 10, p. e1001426, 2012.
[7]
J. Brandstetter, P. Racz, C. Beckner, E. B. Sandoval, J. Hay, and C. Bartneck, "A peer pressure experiment: Recreation of the Asch conformity experiment with robots," in Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2014), 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on, 2014, pp. 1335--1340.
[8]
N. Hertz and E. Wiese, "Influence of agent type and task ambiguity on conformity in social decision making," in Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 2016, pp. 313--317.
[9]
J. Brandstetter, C. Beckner, E. B. Sandoval, and C. Bartneck, "Persistent Lexical Entrainment in HRI," in Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2017, pp. 63--72.

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  1. Safety Blanket of Humanity: Thinking of Unfamiliar Humans or Robots Increases Conformity to Humans

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    HRI '20: Companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
    March 2020
    702 pages
    ISBN:9781450370578
    DOI:10.1145/3371382
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 01 April 2020

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    1. conformity
    2. human-robot interaction

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