English

Can AI Explanations Make You Change Your Mind?

Human-Computer Interaction 2025-08-12 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

In the context of AI-based decision support systems, explanations can help users to judge when to trust the AI's suggestion, and when to question it. In this way, human oversight can prevent AI errors and biased decision-making. However, this rests on the assumption that users will consider explanations in enough detail to be able to catch such errors. We conducted an online study on trust in explainable DSS, and were surprised to find that in many cases, participants spent little time on the explanation and did not always consider it in detail. We present an exploratory analysis of this data, investigating what factors impact how carefully study participants consider AI explanations, and how this in turn impacts whether they are open to changing their mind based on what the AI suggests.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.08158,
  title  = {Can AI Explanations Make You Change Your Mind?},
  author = {Laura Spillner and Rachel Ringe and Robert Porzel and Rainer Malaka},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.08158},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

This paper was presented at the Explainable AI workshop at IJCAI 2025: https://sites.google.com/view/xai2025/proceedings

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:44:39.098Z