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About

Puchu Zhao is a rising scholar at the intersection of social robotics, organizational behavior, and human–robot interaction. Her research investigates how robots influence human social dynamics, particularly in workplace and group settings. In her highly cited 2021 paper, “Adults still can't resist: A social robot can induce normative conformity” (48 citations), Zhao demonstrated that adults conform to peer pressure from a social robot, revealing the subtle yet powerful influence of robotic agents on human judgment. She has since extended this work into organizational contexts, exploring how robot usage affects performance evaluations. Her 2024 study, “Leaders Inflate Performance Ratings for Employees Who Use Robots to Augment Their Performance” (11 citations), shows that supervisors rate employees more favorably when they collaborate with robots, raising important questions about fairness in human–robot co-creation. Most recently, Zhao has conceptualized “Leader Anthropomorphizing Behavior Toward Robots” (2025), a novel framework examining how leaders treat robots as social beings and the downstream effects on employee perceptions of objectification and deviance. With a growing body of work that bridges social psychology and management, Zhao is shaping how we understand leadership, conformity, and evaluation in an increasingly automated world.