A bonus task boosts people's willingness to offload cognition to an algorithm.

Algorithmic appreciation Algorithmic aversion Cognitive offloading Human–computer collaboration Human–computer interaction Social cognition

Journal

Cognitive research: principles and implications
ISSN: 2365-7464
Titre abrégé: Cogn Res Princ Implic
Pays: England
ID NLM: 101697632

Informations de publication

Date de publication:
23 Apr 2024
Historique:
received: 02 08 2023
accepted: 03 04 2024
medline: 23 4 2024
pubmed: 23 4 2024
entrez: 23 4 2024
Statut: epublish

Résumé

With the increased sophistication of technology, humans have the possibility to offload a variety of tasks to algorithms. Here, we investigated whether the extent to which people are willing to offload an attentionally demanding task to an algorithm is modulated by the availability of a bonus task and by the knowledge about the algorithm's capacity. Participants performed a multiple object tracking (MOT) task which required them to visually track targets on a screen. Participants could offload an unlimited number of targets to a "computer partner". If participants decided to offload the entire task to the computer, they could instead perform a bonus task which resulted in additional financial gain-however, this gain was conditional on a high performance accuracy in the MOT task. Thus, participants should only offload the entire task if they trusted the computer to perform accurately. We found that participants were significantly more willing to completely offload the task if they were informed beforehand that the computer's accuracy was flawless (Experiment 1 vs. 2). Participants' offloading behavior was not significantly affected by whether the bonus task was incentivized or not (Experiment 2 vs. 3). These results combined with those from our previous study (Wahn et al. in PLoS ONE 18:e0286102, 2023), which did not include a bonus task but was identical otherwise, show that the human willingness to offload an attentionally demanding task to an algorithm is considerably boosted by the availability of a bonus task-even if not incentivized-and by the knowledge about the algorithm's capacity.

Identifiants

pubmed: 38652184
doi: 10.1186/s41235-024-00550-0
pii: 10.1186/s41235-024-00550-0
doi:

Types de publication

Journal Article Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Langues

eng

Sous-ensembles de citation

IM

Pagination

24

Subventions

Organisme : Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen
ID : Collaborative Research Project INTERACT!

Informations de copyright

© 2024. The Author(s).

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Auteurs

Basil Wahn (B)

Institute of Educational Research, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany. basilwahn@gmail.com.
Department of Cognitive Psychology and Ergonomics, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany. basilwahn@gmail.com.

Laura Schmitz (L)

Department of Neurology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany.

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