Despite the improving accuracy of agent-based expert systems, human expert users aided by these systems have not improved their accuracy. Self-affirmation theory suggests that human expert users could be experiencing threat, causing them to act defensively and ignore the system's conflicting recommendations. Previous research has demonstrated that affirming an individual in an unrelated area reduces defensiveness and increases objectivity to conflicting information. Using an affirmation manipulation prior to a credibility assessment task, this study investigated if experts are threatened by counterattitudinal expert system recommendations. For our study, 178 credibility assessment experts from the American Polygraph Association (n = 134) and the European Union's border security agency Frontex (n = 44) interacted with a deception detection expert system to make a deception judgment that was immediately contradicted. Reducing the threat prior to making their judgments did not improve accuracy, but did improve objectivity toward the system. This study demonstrates that human experts are threatened by advanced expert systems that contradict their expertise. As more and more systems increase integration of artificial intelligence and inadvertently assail the expertise and abilities of users, threat and self-evaluative concerns will become an impediment to technology acceptance.
A major consideration in designing and adopting new communication technologies is their impact on communication processes and outcomes. One way to understand this impact is according to the principle of interpersonal interactivity. Findings from two investigations are reported here that address how properties of task-related communication conducted with differing interfaces relate to perceptions of interaction partners and the outcomes of their collaborative work. Study 1 manipulated the interface affordances of mediation, contingency, and modality richness. Study 2 examined the affordance of mediation. Results show that interfaces that promote higher mutuality and involvement lead to more favorable perceptions of partners' credibility and attraction, and those perceptions are systematically related to higher-quality decisions and more influence. Discussion focuses on the relation between user perceptions, design features, and task outcomes in human-computer interaction and computer-mediated communication.