Lara Watermann, Ksenia Appelganc, Paul Große Maestrup, Saurabh Band, Anna Förster, Christiane Heinicke, Vera Hagemann
AOWI-conference of the German Psychological Society (2023)
The AOWI-conference of the German Psychological Society took place in Kassel from 12th to 15th September, 2023. The AOWI-conference aims to gather psychologists interested in the work, organisational, business and engineering psychology to exchange their views on current research. Lara Watermann presented, on behalf of the project team, first insights from the psychological experiment of the project under the title "Human-AI Teams in a Mars Habitat: The Influence of the Perception of an AI as a Team Member or Tool on Trust and Affect".
Abstract
Question
The progress of artificial intelligence (AI) leads to autonomously acting technical systems. These could even function as independent team members in a team of humans and AI. In the space context, we investigate to what extent the perception of an AI as a team member has a positive influence on the trust and affect towards this AI.
Research Design
Data will be collected experimentally in a Mars habitat. Together with an AI, subjects (N=82) will repair a life support system. For this purpose, the Wizard-of-Oz method is used and the AI is presented at the beginning as either a team member or a tool. The data will be analyzed with a mixed ANOVA and T-tests.
Results
The data collection takes place from January to March 2023. We hypothesize that the AI perceived more as a team member will elicit higher trust and more positive affect. Further, differences in human communication are expected.
Limitations
The sample consists of laypersons and should be replicated with Expert:ins. The interaction was conducted using the Wizard-of-Oz method without actual AI.
Implications
The results can be used to design AI in high-risk organizations so that people not only feel comfortable interacting, but also have an appropriate level of trust in the AI.
Relevance/Contribution
Much research related to human-AI teaming takes place in virtual environments in a military context and is based on written communication. It is unclear to what extent these results can be applied to other contexts and types of communication. With our investigation, we aim to expand the field of research to include new findings that take place in an analog environment, in the context of space travel, and are based on voice control.
