Believing What You See: How Beliefs Affect Human-Autonomy Teaming
Date
2022-12-23
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Abstract
A quasi-experiment was performed to determine the influence that pre-existing beliefs and attitudes towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) may have on several key mechanisms linked to performance and outcomes in Human-Autonomy Teams (HATs). Participants were measured on their general attitudes towards AI, and then placed into conditions based on their attitudes. They then completed an experiment involving teamwork tasks on teams consisting of two participants and one researcher confederate posing as an AI teammate, pilot testing a new research design using a multi-player videogame as the study platform. Individuals were however shown to change their individual attitudes after interaction in the HAT, and participants broadly reported that they worked together with both their human and AI teammates in order to achieve goals, and viewed their AI teammates positively. However, this study found that individual attitudes of team members did not appear to significantly influence mechanisms nor outcomes in teams, as the measured variables in this study (Team Cognition, Engagement, and Perceived Team Performance) did not vary significantly between conditions. Besides a marginal relationship between positive attitudes towards AI and Perceived Team Performance, individual attitudes were not found to relate to predicted outcomes. The results suggests that attitudes towards AI alone may not be appropriate to use as a screening metric for considering membership of individuals in HATs, as individuals appear to readily adjust their perceptions towards AI teammates after interacting with them. Additionally, individually measured attitudes did not appear to aggregate into an appropriate group level variable in this study; development of a group level measure of attitudes towards AI team members could be a prudent addition for future HAT research.
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Keywords
Human-Autonomy Teaming, Teamwork, Artificial Intelligence, Human-AI Interaction, Industrial Organizational Psychology
Citation
Henke, J. (2022). Believing what you see: how beliefs affect human-autonomy teaming (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.