Publication in Frontiers in Behavioural Economics

We are happy to announce that the paper "Humans in XAI: Increased Reliance in Decision-Making Under Uncertainty by Using Explanation Strategies", authored by Olesja Lammert, Birte Richter, Christian Schütze, Kirsten Thommes and Britta Wrede, has been accepted for publication in Frontiers in Behavioral Economics! 

The publication is part of project A03 of the TRR and deals with the design of decision support systems based on artificial intelligence. The focus was on how these systems can be made more transparent and user-friendly. 

Four different explanation strategies were compared that were used by a decision support system, represented by the social agent Floka, to help end users make decisions under uncertainty. An economic experiment was conducted with 742 participants who had to make lottery decisions according to the Holt and Laury paradigm. Two explanatory strategies that provide accurate information (transparent vs. guided) were compared with two strategies based on human-centered explanations (emotional vs. authoritarian) and a baseline without explanation. 

The results show that a guided explanation strategy leads to higher user loyalty than a transparent strategy. Furthermore, the results suggest that user loyalty depends on the chosen explanation strategy and that in some cases the absence of an explanation can also lead to increased user loyalty.