Cooperative resource management in human-agent teams: effects of accountability and interaction structures
摘要
Accountability pressures on human operators supervising automation have been shown to reduce automation bias, but with increasingly autonomous automation enabled by artificial intelligence, the work structure between people and automated agents may be less supervisory and more interactive or team-like. We thus tested the effects of accountability pressures in supervisory and interactive work structures, recruiting 60 participants to interact with an automated agent in a resource management task. High versus low accountability pressures were manipulated based on previous studies, by changing the task environment, i.e., task instructions and the researcher’s dress code. Results show that an interactive control structure facilitated higher throughput, fewer resources shared, and lower resource utility compared to participants in a supervisory control structure. Higher accountability pressures resulted in lower throughput, more resources shared, and lower resource utility compared to lower accountability pressures. Although task environment complexity makes it difficult to draw clean conclusions, our results indicate that with more interactive structures and higher outcome accountability pressures, people will engage in the most available actions to maximize individual performance even when suboptimal performance is needed to achieve the highest joint outcome.