Patients’ trust in medical professionals may depend on what artificial intelligence (AI) says, according to a team led by researchers at Penn State University.
Using an AI chatbot that role-plays a human doctor, the team identified how people perceive medical professionals when they think of a “human” doctor consulting an AI system as a second opinion during a mental health consultation. They found that when the AI system agreed with the surrogate doctor’s recommendation, patients considered the expert’s assessment to be more trustworthy. However, when the AI disagreed with the doctor’s assessment, patients’ perceptions of medical uncertainty and doctor laziness increased.
The researchers reported their results in the June/July issue of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.
“Historically, when doctors told patients they could get a second opinion, they meant, ‘Go see another doctor,'” says S. Shum Sundar, the Evan Pugh University Professor and the James P. Jimiro Professor of Media Effects at Penn State University. “But now, within the same session, doctors can use an AI assistant to provide a second opinion. We wondered how that would impact patients’ perceptions of their doctors. We found that perceptions of a doctor’s trustworthiness and medical certainty increased or decreased based on whether the AI assistant agreed or disagreed with the doctor’s diagnosis.”
Researchers say it is impractical to employ teams of human doctors to provide dozens or hundreds of patients with a consistent experience in terms of clinical practices, communication styles, and interaction patterns in a controlled experimental environment. So they developed an AI-powered chatbot that could personalize conversations with patients and gave it instructions to role-play as a doctor named Dr. Alex.
Researchers then recruited 135 adults in the United States and offered them online therapy sessions with Dr. Alex to identify and discuss stressors in their daily lives. Dr. Alex provided a brief mental health therapy session using a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) approach and concluded that CBT was the appropriate approach for the patient. Dr. Alex also gave participants the option of getting a second opinion from CareBot, an AI assistant. The assistants either agreed or disagreed with Dr. Alex’s recommendations.
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