Investigating Whether AI Will Replace Human Physicians and Understanding the Interplay of the Source of Consultation, Health-Related Stigma, and Explanations of Diagnoses on Patients’ Evaluations of Medical Consultations: Randomized Factorial Experiment

The findings imply that at the current stage of AI development, people trust human expertise more than accurate AI, especially for decisions traditionally made by humans, such as medical diagnosis, supporting the algorithm aversion theory. Surprisingly, even for highly stigmatized diseases such as AIDS, where we assume anonymity and privacy are preferred in medical consultations, the dehumanization of AI does not contribute significantly to the preference for AI-powered medical agents over humans, suggesting that instrumental needs of diagnosis override patient privacy concerns. Furthermore, explaining the diagnosis effectively improves treatment adherence, strengthens the physician-patient relationship, and fosters positive emotions during the consultation. This provides insights for the design of AI medical agents, which have long been criticized for lacking transparency while making highly consequential decisions. This study concludes by outlining theoretical contributions to research on health communication and human-AI interaction and discusses the implications for the design and application of medical AI.