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 shape peoples' likelihood of seeking out or relying on AI. 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 both seeking out and relying on AI suggestions, 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 decision-making pattern plays a significant role in their adoption and reliance on AI, which provides a new understanding of individual differences in AI-assisted decision-making.
@article{arxiv.2505.01537,
title = {Passing the Buck to AI: How Individuals' Decision-Making Patterns Affect Reliance on AI},
author = {Katelyn Xiaoying Mei and Rock Yuren Pang and Alex Lyford and Lucy Lu Wang and Katharina Reinecke},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.01537},
year = {2026}
}