AI Behavioral Science
This paper proposes a new interdisciplinary field for researchers interested in the societal impact of AI and the application of AI to social sciences.
This paper proposes a new field called "AI Behavioral Science" to study AI behavior using social science tools, leverage AI to understand human behavior, and analyze the implications of human-AI interactions on economic and political outcomes.
We outline a foundation for a new field of ``AI Behavioral Science,'' covering three perspectives. First, as AI becomes ubiquitous and is increasingly proprietary and opaque, it becomes vital to develop techniques for assessing AI behavior. We outline how tools developed to assess people's behaviors by social scientists can be used to assess and infer AI's behaviors biases, tendencies, and heuristics. Second, we also discuss how AI can change the ways in which we learn about human behavior. Beyond its computational power, AI offers new techniques for simulating, inferring, and predicting human behaviors that we outline and discuss. Third, as humans and AI are interacting in increasingly complex and intertwined systems, we need to understand the implications for the resulting economic and political outcomes. We outline issues that are increasingly pressing concerning the future of human-AI interactions and potential changes and disruptions that can ensue.