Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Despite substantial progress in artificial intelligence (AI), little is known about people’s moral intuitions towards AI systems. Given that politico-moral intuitions often influence judgements in non-rational ways, we investigated participants’ willingness to act on verdicts provided by an expert AI system, trust in AI, and perceived fairness of AI as a function of the AI system’s (dis)agreement with their pre-existing politico-moral beliefs across various morally contentious issues. Results show belief alignment triggered a willingness to act on AI verdicts but did not increase trust or fairness perception of the AI. This result was unaffected by general AI attitudes. Our findings suggest a disassociation between acceptance of AI recommendations and judgements of trust/fairness of the AI, and that such acceptance is partly driven by alignment with pre-existing intuitions.