The Interdisciplinary Team of Professor Qin Xin from Our School Published an Online Review in the Sub-journal of Science

Recently, the interdisciplinary team of Professor Qin Xin from our school published an online review in the international top academic journal Science Robotics. By comparing two empirical studies on social robots and herd behavior, the review summarizes different situations in which social robots influence adult herd behavior, and discusses the importance of ethical norms and considerations in the application of social robots.

This review focuses on comparing and reviewing the empirical study published in Science Robotics in 2018 "Children Conform, Adults Resist: A robot group induced peer pressure on normative social conformity" (Vollmer et al., 2018) and the empirical study "Adults still can't resist: A social robot can induce normative conformity" (Qin et al., 2022), which will be published in Computers in Human Behavior (2020 Impact Factor: 6.829) in 2022, and then discusses the impact of social robots (hereinafter referred to as "robots") on human herd behavior in different situations. Qin et al. (2022) discovered for the first time that in certain situations (that is, robots are the minority in human-machine mixed groups), adults can also be influenced by robots to generate herd behavior, which reveals that robots do have the ability to force humans to follow obviously wrong suggestions. The second paper mentioned above is the latest research result of Professor Qin Xin’s interdisciplinary team. The School of Business, Sun Yat-sen University is the independent corresponding unit of this paper. The first author of this paper is Professor Qin Xin, and the corresponding author is Associate Professor Chen Chen. Co-authors also include Associate Professor Kai Chi Yam from National University of Singapore Business School, doctoral student Cao Limei and post-doctoral student Li Wanlu from the School of Business, Sun Yat-sen University, doctoral student Guan Jian from Antai College of Economics & Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, doctoral students Zhao Puchu, Dong Xiaowei, and undergraduate Lin Yiqiang from the School of Business, Sun Yat-sen University.

The review hopes that the finding of Qin et al. (2022) that social robots may indeed trigger individual herd behavior will inspire robot scholars and applied ethicists to further design rules and methods for safer and ethical interactions between humans and robots in society.