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Human vs. machine: the psychological and behavioral consequences of being compared to an outperforming artificial agent

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Abstract

While artificial agents (AA) such as Artificial Intelligence are being extensively developed, a popular belief that AA will someday surpass human intelligence is growing. The present research examined whether this common belief translates into negative psychological and behavioral consequences when individuals assess that an AA performs better than them on cognitive and intellectual tasks. In two studies, participants were led to believe that an AA performed better or less well than them on a cognitive inhibition task (Study 1) and on an intelligence task (Study 2). Results indicated that being outperformed by an AA increased subsequent participants’ performance as long as they did not experience psychological discomfort towards the AA and self-threat. Psychological implications in terms of motivation and potential threat as well as the prerequisite for the future interactions of humans with AAs are further discussed.

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Notes

  1. Alphas less than 0.7 are considered as non-reliable (Cronbach, 1951; James Dean Brown, 2002).

  2. Data are available at https://osf.io/f9z6r/.

  3. For second session analyses similar to Normand & Croizet (2013), see Supplementary Material.

  4. However we controlled that participants’ performance on the Raven matrices did not differ in Session 1, F(2, 73) = 429., p = .653, ηp2 = .012.

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Correspondence to Nicolas Spatola.

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This study was approved by the Clermont-Ferrand IRM UCA Ethics Committee (Ref.: IRB00011540-2018-23) and was carried out in accordance with the provisions of the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki.

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All data are publicly available via the Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/7yd9v/.

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Spatola, N., Normand, A. Human vs. machine: the psychological and behavioral consequences of being compared to an outperforming artificial agent. Psychological Research 85, 915–925 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01317-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01317-0

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