AI-Assisted Decision-Making: A Cognitive Modeling Approach to Infer Latent Reliance Strategies

AI assistance is readily available to humans in a variety of decision-making applications. In order to fully understand the efficacy of such joint decision-making, it is important to first understand the human's reliance on AI. However, there is a disconnect between how joint decision-making is studied and how it is practiced in the real world. More often than not, researchers ask humans to provide independent decisions before they are shown AI assistance. This is done to make explicit the influence of AI assistance on the human's decision. We develop a cognitive model that allows us to infer the latent reliance strategy of humans on AI assistance without asking the human to make an independent decision. We validate the model's predictions through two behavioral experiments. The first experiment follows a concurrent paradigm where humans are shown AI assistance alongside the decision problem. The second experiment follows a sequential paradigm where humans provide an independent judgment on a decision problem before AI assistance is made available. The model’s predicted reliance strategies closely track the strategies employed by humans in the two experimental paradigms. Our model provides a principled way to infer reliance on AI-assistance and may be used to expand the scope of investigation on human-AI collaboration.