Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Empirical work on people's perceptions of AI advisors has found evidence for both “algorithm aversion” and “algorithm appreciation.” We investigated whether these differing reactions stem from two different paths of processing: assessing the content of the advice and evaluating the source (AI vs. human advisor). In two survey studies, people were as strongly persuaded by the advice of an AI as that of a human advisor; nonetheless, people's approval of and trust in the AI advisor was consistently lower. This pattern of dissociation suggests that algorithm aversion and algorithm appreciation can occur at the same time, but along different response paths.