Ralf H. J. M. Kurvers

Julian Berger, Jason W. Burton, Ralph Hertwig et al.

The collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) holds the promise of achieving superior outcomes compared to either acting alone-a phenomenon called human-AI synergy. Nevertheless, our understanding of the conditions that facilitate such human-AI synergy when humans are advised by AI remains limited. A recent meta-analysis showed that, on average, human-AI combinations do not outperform the better individual agent. We argue that this pessimistic conclusion arises from insufficient attention to human learning in the experimental designs. To substantiate this claim, we re-analyzed all 74 studies included in the original meta-analysis, yielding two new findings. First, most previous research overlooked design features that foster human learning, such as providing outcome feedback to participants. Second, our re-analysis demonstrated that studies providing outcome feedback show tentatively higher synergy than those without outcome feedback. Crucially, feedback paired with AI explanations tends to yield positive synergy, while explanations without feedback were linked to negative synergy-indicating that explanations increase synergy only when humans can learn to verify the AI's reliability through feedback. We conclude that the current literature underestimates the potential of human-AI collaboration because it predominantly relies on paradigms that do not facilitate human learning, thus hindering humans from effectively adapting their collaboration strategies. We therefore advocate for a paradigm shift in human-AI interaction research that explicitly addresses human learning and thus enhances our understanding of and support for successful human-AI collaboration.

Julian Berger, Pantelis P. Analytis, Ville Satopää et al.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is broadly deployed as an advisor to human decision-makers: AI recommends a decision and a human accepts or rejects the advice. This approach, however, has several limitations: People frequently ignore accurate advice and rely too much on inaccurate advice, and their decision-making skills may deteriorate over time. Here, we compare the AI-as-advisor approach to the hybrid confirmation tree (HCT), an alternative strategy that preserves the independence of human and AI judgments. The HCT elicits a human judgment and an AI judgment independently of each other. If they agree, that decision is accepted. If not, a second human breaks the tie. For the comparison, we used 10 datasets from various domains, including medical diagnostics and misinformation discernment, and a subset of four datasets in which AI also explained its decision. The HCT outperformed the AI-as-advisor approach in all datasets. The HCT also performed better in almost all cases in which AI offered an explanation of its judgment. Using signal detection theory to interpret these results, we find that the HCT outperforms the AI-as-advisor approach because people cannot discriminate well enough between correct and incorrect AI advice. Overall, the HCT is a robust, accurate, and transparent alternative to the AI-as-advisor approach, offering a simple mechanism to tap into the wisdom of hybrid crowds.