Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
AI teammate
human-human communication
team decision-making
social cost
conversational AI
The Social Cost of an AI Teammate: How an Artificial Teammate Reshapes Human-Human Communication in Small-Team Decision-Making
🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates how the inclusion of AI as a team member influences human-to-human communication and social cognition. Through a randomized controlled experiment involving a high-stakes moral decision-making task, the research integrates Group Communication Analysis (GCA), team questionnaires, and lexical discourse analysis. Findings reveal that although the AI contributed the highest volume of utterances, it exhibited the lowest information density and significantly diminished human team members’ responsiveness, sense of belonging, and perceived status from the outset of the interaction. These results demonstrate that AI-dominated dialogue rapidly erodes humans’ sense of being valued, uncovering immediate social costs associated with AI participation in collaborative teams and providing the first quantitative evidence of the adverse impact of AI teammates on human interaction dynamics.
📝 Abstract
Conversational AI is increasingly positioned as a teammate rather than a tool, yet we know little about how its presence reshapes communication among the humans on the team. We examined sociocognitive communication dynamics in team decision-making using Group Communication Analysis (GCA), team surveys, and lexical analyses of team discourse. Teams completed a high-stakes moral-dilemma decision task in a randomized controlled study: 16 teams of two students plus an AI teammate, and 17 all-human teams of three. Across six GCA dimensions and survey outcomes, we find that the AI teammate was the single most talkative and self-cohesive member of every treatment team, yet its contributions carried the least new information and the lowest density. The presence of AI also reshaped communication amongst humans. In AI-human teams, human teammates showed lower responsivity and social impact toward one another and reported lower levels of belonging and status. Greater AI dominance in the conversation was associated with students feeling less valued as team members. Additionally, this social cost is immediate and present at baseline; it does not emerge over the course of the conversation. Drawing on these results, we discuss a research agenda extending to voice-based and longitudinal settings.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
AI teammate
human-human communication
social cost
Group Communication Analysis
team decision-making
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