Do you only trust WALL-E because he’s cute?

At the simplest level there is the question of whether there are situations in which we trust the algorithms – the decision-making and problem-solving procedures – of machines more than those of humans. One set of researchers trying to understand this question provided people with a range of experiences in which they compared human decisions to machine algorithms in determining the future potential of business school applicants.

In the study the humans were consistently out-performed by the machine algorithms – the machines were better able to identify which applicants would become the highest performing students over time – but the participants were more willing to trust the human decisions anyway. These researchers claim that people experience something called algorithm aversion: avoiding or distrusting a machine algorithm after seeing it make a mistake.

Now you might think that this sounds natural; of course you would avoid something that you know makes mistakes. But the people in the study saw both the humans and the machine algorithms make mistakes, and the human errors were consistently much larger than those made by the machines. It didn’t matter. While people in the study were relatively willing to overlook or justify sometimes large errors by human decision-makers, even small mistakes on the part of the machine algorithm made people unwilling to trust it again.