Misattribution of Error Origination: The Impact of Preconceived Expectations in Co-Operative Online Games

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As artificial intelligence and smart devices increasingly infiltrate everyday life, cooperative interactions between humans and computers are correspondingly becoming more common. Errors are an inevitability in these interactions and can destabilise long-term working relationships. In this work, three online games of increasing difficulty (N=2037) were designed where participants played a cooperative game with an artificial AI player and encountered an unexpected error. Different training methods were used to establish a rapport between the human and AI players. Overall, despite answering correctly, participants were increasingly more likely to say they had made a mistake and that they were to blame as the difficulty of the game increased. Since participants were also unaware of the extent of their exposure to AI, this study shows that there is a tendency to apply preconceived expectations of AI and misattribute error origination which, if not addressed, could lead to critical breakdowns of trust.