Influence of Priming Information for Robots on Peer Pressure

Peer pressure is a major social influence, in which the opinion of the majority forces persons who hold the minority opinion to match the opinion of the majority implicitly when making decisions within a group. This study aimed to investigate the effects of priming information (i.e., whether robots are controlled by human operators) on peer pressure effects from multiple robots. We conducted an experiment where participants and multiple robots joined a visual judgment task. We instructed the participants that they would be operating the robots, and we let the participants operate the robots before the experiment. The experiment results did not show significant priming effects, but we found that the sex of participants influences peer pressure effects.