Asch Meets HRI: Human Conformity to Robot Groups
This addresses group dynamics and peer pressure in industrial settings where humans and robots co-work, but it is incremental as it transfers an existing psychological experiment to a new context.
The study investigates human conformity to robot groups by adapting the Asch experiment to industrial human-robot interaction, aiming to measure how participants follow false responses from groups of robots versus individuals.
We present a research outline that aims at investigating group dynamics and peer pressure in the context of industrial robots. Our research plan was motivated by the fact that industrial robots became already an integral part of human-robot co-working. However, industrial robots have been sparsely integrated into research on robot credibility, group dynamics, and potential users' tendency to follow a robot's indication. Therefore, we aim to transfer the classic Asch experiment (see \cite{Asch_51}) into HRI with industrial robots. More precisely, we will test to what extent participants follow a robot's response when confronted with a group (vs. individual) industrial robot arms (vs. human) peers who give a false response. We are interested in highlighting the effects of group size, perceived robot credibility, psychological stress, and peer pressure in the context of industrial robots. With the results of this research, we hope to highlight group dynamics that might underlie HRI in industrial settings in which numerous robots already work closely together with humans in shared environments.