AI-induced Indifference: Unfair AI Reduces Prosociality

The growing prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) in our lives has brought the impact of AI-based decisions on human judgments to the forefront of academic scholarship and public debate. Despite a massive growth in research related to receptivity towards AI, little is known about how interactions between humans and AI shape subsequent interactions among humans. We explore this question in the context of unfair decisions determined by AI versus humans and focus on the spillover effects of such interactions on prosociality. Four experiments (combined N = 2425) show that receiving an unfair allocation by an AI (vs. a human) actor leads to a lower rate of prosocial punishment in a subsequent decision—an effect we call AI-induced indifference. In Experiment 1, after receiving an unfair monetary allocation by an AI (versus a human) actor, people are less likely to altruistically sanction a human actor at a personal cost in a subsequent, unrelated decision. Experiments 2a and 2b provide evidence of the underlying mechanism: People blame AI actors less than their human counterparts for unfair behavior, decreasing their desire to subsequently sanction injustice. In an incentive-compatible design, Experiment 3 shows that AI-induced indifference manifests even when the interaction with AI occurs in a different domain than the human-to-human interaction. These findings directly address the spillover effect of human-AI interaction on human-to-human interactions and suggest that interacting with unfair AI may desensitize people to the behavior of unfair human actors. Implications for future research are discussed.