Do Synchronized Multiple Robots Exert Peer Pressure?

In human-human interaction, peer pressure is a major social influence on people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The larger the group of people, the more social influence it exerts. In this paper, we investigate whether multiple robots and their synchronized behaviors exert peer pressure on people, as in human groups. We developed a multiple robot controller system that enables robots to perform precise synchronization. In the experiment, we prepared a setting that resembled previous experiments that investigated peer pressure between people and robots. The participants answered questions after hearing the robots' answers, only some of which were incorrect. Our experiment results showed that the influence of the synchronized multiple robots increased the error rates of the participants, but we found no significant effects toward conformity.