Social Decisions and Fairness Change When People's Interests Are Represented by Autonomous Agents

Recent times have seen an emergence of a new breed of intelligent machines that act autonomously on our behalf, such as autonomous vehicles, drones, personal assistants, etc. These machines introduce a new interaction paradigm where people instruct, or program, these agents to act on their behalf with others. Here we show that this act of programming changes the way people think about the situation, often leading them to adopt a broader perspective and act more fairly. We present four studies where participants made fairer decisions in ultimatum and negotiation tasks when engaging through an agent representative, when compared to direct interaction with others. These findings emphasize the importance of understanding the cognitive factors underlying people's decision making when designing autonomous machines, if we wish to promote a fairer society.