Investigating Conformity and the Role of Personality in a Visual Decision Task with Humanoid Robot Peers

Effective implementation of mixed initiative teams, where humans work alongside machines, requires increased understanding of the decision-making process and the role of social influence exerted by non-human peers. Conformity—the act of adjusting attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors to those of another—is considered to be the strongest of these social pressures. Previous studies have attempted to understand conformity with humans interacting with a group of robots, but these have failed to identify satisfactory explanations for inconsistent findings. Grounded in trait-activation theory, we propose that personality is a critical factor that needs to be considered. In this effort, we recreated the famous social psychology experiment by Solomon Asch and conducted a single condition study to explore the effects of social influence on decision making. Our study results showed conformity with robot peers did occur. Moreover, scores on the Openness personality trait were a significant predictor of conformity