The Effect of AI Advice on Human Confidence in Decision-Making

Abstract

As artificial intelligence advances, it can increasingly be applied in collaborative decision-making contexts with humans. However, questions on the design of different collaborative environments remain open. In the context of AI-assisted human decision-making processes, we analyze the influence of AI advice on human confidence in the final decision. In a laboratory experiment, 458 subjects performed an image classification task. We compare their confidence over three treatments: i) a baseline case where subjects do not receive any AI advice; ii) where subjects receive AI advice; and iii) in addition to AI advice subjects also see the certainty of AI for its choice. Our results suggest that while AI advice can increase human overconfidence, this effect can be mitigated by augmenting the AI advice with its certainty. Our result not only contributes to the growing literature of human-AI collaboration, but also bears important practical implications for the design of collaborative systems.