He said, she said, it said: Effects of robot group membership and human authority on people's willingness to follow their instructions

Research in HRI indicates that people follow a robot's instructions even when they are incorrect. However, when a robot's instructions or requests contradict those of a human (e.g. an authoritative experimenter), people obey the human instead. This might be due to the experimenter's perceived ingroup status, or to their higher presumed authority compared to the robot. This study manipulated experimenter authority (high, low) and robot group membership (ingroup, neutral) to test how they affected responses to conflicting orders from the two agents depending on the request's importance (big, small). While there was no main effect of group membership and authority on most participant behavior, when experimenter authority was low and the robot an ingroup member, participants defied the experimenter's instructions to turn off an ingroup robot at the end of the experiment, following the robot's instructions instead. Further, request importance affected participant behavior. Participants typically followed the robot's low-importance requests (e.g., moving from one chair to another), but not high-importance requests (e.g., how to perform a simulated task of diagnosing and talking to patients).