Influence by others' opinions: Social pressure from agents in immersive virtual environments

Virtual Reality is used in fields of cognitive sciences to study participants' reactions. In such cases, existence of other avatars in the virtual environment is a crucial factor. In this study we investigate whether agents have social influence on the participants by performing the Asch conformity experiment (1951) in an immersive virtual environment. Findings are demonstrating that participants' response times were affected by the judgments of agents existing in the virtual environment.