Metacognitive sensitivity: The key to calibrating trust and optimal decision making with AI

Knowing when to trust and incorporate the advice from artificially intelligent (AI) systems is of increasing importance in the modern world. Research indicates that when AI provides high confidence ratings, human users often correspondingly increase their trust in such judgments, but these increases in trust can occur even when AI fails to provide accurate information on a given task. In this piece, we argue that measures of metacognitive sensitivity provided by AI systems will likely play a critical role in (1) helping individuals to calibrate their level of trust in these systems and (2) optimally incorporating advice from AI into human–AI hybrid decision making. We draw upon a seminal finding in the perceptual decision-making literature that demonstrates the importance of metacognitive ratings for optimal joint decisions and outline a framework to test how different types of information provided by AI systems can guide decision making.