Masters Theses

Date of Award

12-2020

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

Experimental Psychology

Major Professor

Garriy Shteynberg

Committee Members

Michael Olson, Lowell Gaertner

Abstract

Conformity is the process that occurs when we submit to group pressures. These pressures can come from normative social influence, a desire to be liked, and informational social influence, the belief that the group has information that we do not. In the current study, the classic Asch line judgment paradigm is combined with virtual reality technology to study social influence in groups of both humans and artificial intelligences. Additionally, the line judgment task is varied as either unambiguous or ambiguous. The results indicated that participants were more likely to not conform to unambiguous stimuli and artificial intelligence confederates. Response times also suggest that participants respond slower to normative social influence. In addition to providing a novel contribution to the conformity literature, the study suggests future directions for research using this paradigm.

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