Putting a human in the loop: Increasing uptake, but decreasing accuracy of automated decision-making.

Automated decision-making gains traction, prompting discussions on regulation with calls for human oversight. Understanding how human involvement affects the acceptance of algorithmic recommendations and the accuracy of resulting decisions is vital. In an online experiment (N = 292), for a prediction task, participants choose a recommendation stemming either from an algorithm or another participant. In a between-subject design, we varied if the prediction was delegated completely or if the recommendation could be adjusted. 66% of times, participants preferred to delegate the decision to an algorithm over an equally accurate human. The preference for an algorithm increased by 7 percentage points if participants could monitor and adjust the recommendations. Participants followed algorithmic recommendations more closely. Importantly, they were less likely to intervene with the least accurate recommendations. Hence, in our experiment the human-in-the-loop design increases the uptake but decreases the accuracy of the decisions.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2024 Sele, Chugunova. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)