Background
Communicating machines, in the form of social robots, have been found to exert social influence, in the form of group pressure, on humans’ conformity behavior (typically demonstrated with conceptual replications of the famous Asch-type experiments). At the same time, research in the context of exemplification theory has shown that human exemplars can overrule (base-rate) information that people encounter in media texts, thus also exerting social influence on people (Zillmann & Brosius, 2000). Therefore, our study aims to investigate whether social robots as exemplars can influence people’s personal opinions.
About this Project
This research is led by Professor Jochen Peter. I’ve been a member of the Machines and Social Influence team since May 2025. My major responsibility is to program and coordinate four NAO robots. Our code base is open-source and can be found in Github (see project portal at the top of this page). The project is still in progress — if you’re curious, please stick around!