Abstract

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) enable AI agents to go beyond simply supportinghuman activities and, instead, take more control in team decision-making. While significant litera-ture has studied human-AI collaboration through the lens of AI as a “second opinion system,” thistype 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 humanimpacts human-AI decision-making and team performance. Using a human subjects experiment inwhich participants collaborate with two AI teammates for truss structure (aka, bridge) design, wemanipulate a series of voting scenarios (e.g., AI agents outvoting the human vs. AI agents agree-ing with the human) and AI performance levels (high vs. low performing). The results indicate thatchanges 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 resultsalso show that when humans are outvoted by their AI teammates, they do not show strong nega-tive emotional reactions if the team-voted decision has an advantageous outcome. Additionally, AIperformance significantly influences the human-AI team decision-making process and even onelow-performing AI (i.e., an AI that is frequently incorrect) on the team can significantly deteriorateteam performance. Taken together, this research provides empirical evidence on the effects of AIvoting with equal decision authority on human-AI collaboration, as well as valuable insightssupporting real-world applications of human-AI collaboration via voting.