Psychological Benefits and Costs of Diversifying Algorithmic Recourse
Abstract
Algorithmic recourse provides counterfactual action plans that help people overturn unfavorable AI decisions. While diverse recourse sets may improve transparency and motivation, they may also impose cognitive load and negative emotions by increasing counterfactual reasoning demands. To examine this trade-off, we conducted a between-subjects controlled experiment (N=750) that manipulated recourse-set diversity and size, and evaluated these effects on psychological benefits and costs. Results show that diversification enhances psychological benefits (e.g., willingness to act) for small sets without incurring additional psychological costs, whereas for large sets, it makes cognitive load more salient. These findings suggest that naively diversifying recourse can burden decision subjects, underscoring the need for new diversification methods that incorporate human cognition and psychology to mitigate such costs.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.11793,
title = {Psychological Benefits and Costs of Diversifying Algorithmic Recourse},
author = {Tomu Tominaga and Naomi Yamashita and Takeshi Kurashima},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.11793},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
This article contains the supplementary materials described in the paper to be appeared in Proceedings of the IJCAI-ECAI 2026 Special Track on: Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence: Multidisciplinary Contours and Challenges of Next-Generation AI Research and Applications., https://2026.ijcai.org/ijcai-ecai-2026-call-for-papers-human-centred-ai/