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People Will Follow a Robot In an Emergency - Even If It's Wrong (gatech.edu)
An anonymous reader writes: Imagine a future where instead of siting through fire alarms with your fingers in your ears, a robot come comes to greet you and guide you out of the building. Researchers at Georgia Tech created an emergency guidance robot and then looked at whether or not people would follow the robot during an emergency. 'The research was designed to determine whether or not building occupants would trust a robot designed to help them evacuate a high-rise in case of fire or other emergency. But the researchers were surprised to find that the test subjects followed the robot's instructions – even when the machine's behavior should not have inspired trust.' The robot first guided people to a meeting room. In some conditions the robot broke along the way to the meeting room. Then, unbeknownst to the subjects, the researchers filled the hallway with smoke and set off the fire alarms. Given the option of going out the way they came or following the robot down an unknown hall, nearly all followed the robot.
It's not about it being a robot or about pushing blame. In an emergency a sub-optimal percentage of people take charge, but that's still better than everyone taking charge. You can't get a hundred people out of a burning building by having each of them screaming at the others to shut up and follow. It makes sense to follow an entity designated "emergency guidance" whether it's human or robot because that entity is more likely to understand the structure, situation, and risks than oneself.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
If the researchers had designed a correct control for the experiment, they'd know that robots have nothing to do with it. Milgram's Obedience Experiment 50 years ago tells us exactly what happened: people deemed the robot to be an authority, thus followed it uncritically.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
No, but you can get yourself out by looking for those legally required "EXIT->" signs
Studies have shown that, in an emergency, people will follow the EXIT signs even when they are wrong.
If you look at it from an anthropological perspective, trust based societies are more productive, and better adapted to survive. People working together as a group, following local leadership (tribal identity etc), will nearly always experience better outcomes during a disaster than a collection of individuals that are predisposed to deceiving each other. So, you can blame evolution for the inherent trust of authority, because the people who are always lying and not working together, end up dead.