Social influences in the digital era: When do people conform more to a human being or an artificial intelligence?

The spread of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in ever-widening domains (e.g., virtual assistants) increases the chances of daily interactions between humans and AI. But can non-human agents influence human beings and perhaps even surpass the power of the influence of another human being? This research investigated whether people faced with different tasks (objective vs. subjective) could be more influenced by the information provided by another human being or an AI. We expected greater AI (vs. other humans) influence in objective tasks (i.e., based on a count and only one possible correct answer). By contrast, we expected greater human (vs. AI) influence in subjective tasks (based on attributing meaning to evocative images). In Study 1, participants (N = 156) completed a series of trials of an objective task to provide numerical estimates of the number of white dots pictured on black backgrounds. Results showed that participants conformed more with the AI's responses than the human ones. In Study 2, participants (N = 102) in a series of subjective tasks observed evocative images associated with two concepts ostensibly provided, again, by an AI or a human. Then, they rated how each concept described the images appropriately. Unlike the objective task, in the subjective one, participants conformed more with the human than the AI's responses. Overall, our findings show that under some circumstances, AI can influence people above and beyond the influence of other humans, offering new insights into social influence processes in the digital era.

Forced Social Isolation and Mental Health: A Study on 1,006 Italians Under COVID-19 Lockdown.

Most countries have been struggling with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic imposing social isolation on their citizens. However, this measure carried risks for people's mental health. This study evaluated the psychological repercussions of objective isolation in 1,006 Italians during the first, especially strict, lockdown in spring 2020. Although varying for the regional spread-rate of the contagion, results showed that the longer the isolation and the less adequate the physical space where people were isolated, the worse the mental health (e.g., depression). Offline social contacts buffered the association between social isolation and mental health. However, when offline contacts were limited, online contacts seemed crucial in protecting mental health. The findings inform about the potential downsides of the massive social isolation imposed by COVID-19 spread, highlighting possible risk factors and resources to account for implementing such isolation measures. Specifically, besides some known factors such as physical space availability, the local contagion rate is critical in moderating the link between social isolation and mental health issues, supporting national policies implementing regional tiers of restriction severity.