It seems the placebo effect is ubiquitous. With all the recent excitement and ocnjecture about rapid advances in Artifical Intelligence and Machine Learning, it seems that our belief that a decision is backed by an AI will not only enhance our confidence in the veracity of that decision, but also make for better decisions! This research shows that:

“Participants were asked to solve word puzzles while being supported by no system or an adaptive AI interface. All participants experienced the same word puzzle difficulty and had no support from an AI throughout the experiments. Our results showed that the belief of receiving adaptive AI support increases expectations regarding the participant’s own task performance, sustained after interaction. These expectations were positively correlated to performance, as indicated by the number of solved word puzzles.”