How Being Outvoted by AI Teammates Impacts Human-AI Collaboration

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) enable AI agents to go beyond simply supporting human activities and, instead, take more control in team decision-making. While significant literature has studied human-AI collaboration through the lens of AI as a "second opinion system," this type of interaction is not fully representative of many human-human team collaboration scenarios, such as scenarios where each decision maker is granted equal voting rights for the team decision. In this research, we explore how imparting AI agents with equal voting rights to the human impacts human-AI decision-making and team performance. Using a human subjects experiment in which participants collaborate with two AI teammates for truss structure (aka, bridge) design, we manipulate a series of voting scenarios (e.g., AI agents outvoting the human vs. AI agents agreeing with the human) and AI performance levels (high vs. low performing). The results indicate that changes in human self-confidence are not consistent with whether the quality of the final team-voted design action is advantageous or disadvantageous relative to their own actions. The results also show that when humans are outvoted by their AI teammates, they do not show strong negative emotional reactions if the team-voted decision has an advantageous outcome. Additionally, AI performance significantly influences the human-AI team decision-making process and even one low-performing AI (i.e., an AI that is frequently incorrect) on the team can significantly deteriorate team performance. Taken together, this research provides empirical evidence on the effects of AI voting with equal decision authority on human-AI collaboration, as well as valuable insights supporting real-world applications of human-AI collaboration via voting.