People who depend on chatbots at work could face a crisis of confidence in their reasoning and “perceived ownership of ideas,” according to researchers whose work was published by the American Psychological Association.
After surveying 1,923 volunteers in Canada and the US, the Middlesex University researchers reported that six out ten admitted that artificial intelligence “did most of the thinking,” with men more inclined to lean on the bots than women.
Study participants “reported reduced confidence in their own independent reasoning, lesser perceived ownership of ideas, and making trade-offs between task speed and depth of thought,” according to the APA, describing the findings as a correlation.
Conversely, people who did not take the chatbots’ output at face value and sought to challenge them or add some of their own research said they felt more confident and had retained a greater sense of ownership or authorship.
“The issue was not AI use itself but the degree of passive acceptance,” said Sarah Baldeo of Middlesex University, adding that asserting oversight and “active judgement” appears to leave people feeling “more confident in their own reasoning.”
The team had participants use a range of widely available AI platforms in simulated workplace scenarios such as planning under uncertainty, multistep sequencing and decision making.
“Participants were encouraged to use commercially available large language model systems as they normally would,” the team said in the paper, which was published in the APA journal Technology, Mind and Behavior.
The APA research followed the recent warning by a University of Pennsylvania team that people who “routinely accept algorithmically generated answers, explanations and predictions” could be engaging in a form of “cognitive surrender” in which ingrained thought processes based on human intuition and deliberation are demoted.
“AI tools are not merely assisting decision-making; they are becoming decision-makers,” the Pennsylvania team said.
