Passing the Buck to AI: How Individuals’ Decision-Making Patterns Affect Reliance on AI

Psychological research has identified different patterns individuals have while making decisions, such as vigilance (making decisions after thorough information gathering), hypervigilance (rushed and anxious decision-making), and buckpassing (deferring decisions to others). We examine whether these decision-making patterns affect peoples’ engagement with AIgenerated information in decision-making. In an online experiment with 810 participants tasked with distinguishing food facts from myths, we found that a higher buckpassing tendency was positively correlated with the likelihood of seeking AI information and reported reliance on AI, while being negatively correlated with the time spent reading AI explanations. In contrast, the higher a participant tended towards vigilance, the more carefully they scrutinized the AI’s information, as indicated by an increased time spent looking through the AI’s explanations. These findings suggest that a person’s decisionmaking pattern plays a significant role in their interactions with AI suggestions, which provides a new understanding of individual differences in AI-assisted decision-making.