  The main aim of our study was to analyse the effects of a virtual environment
on social conformity, with particular attention to the effects of different
types of task and psychological variables on social influence, on one side, and
to the neural correlates related to conformity, measured by means of an Emotiv
EPOC device on the other. For our purpose, we replicated the famous Asch's
visual task and created two new tasks of increasing ambiguity, assessed through
the calculation of the item's entropy. We also administered five scales in
order to assess different psychological traits. From the experiment, conducted
on 181 university students, emerged that conformity grows according to the
ambiguity of the task, but normative influence is significantly weaker in
virtual environments, if compared to face-to-face experiments. The analysed
psycho-logical traits, however, result not to be relatable to conformity, and
they only affect the subjects' response times. From the ERP (Event-related
potentials) analysis, we detected N200 and P300 components comparing the plots
of conformist and non-conformist subjects, alongside with the detection of
their Late Positive Potential, Readiness Potential, and Error-Related
Negativity, which appear consistently different for the two typologies.

Human-Computer Interaction