AI-Induced Human Responsibility (AIHR) in AI-Human teams

AI-related incidents are becoming increasingly frequent and severe, ranging from safety failures to misuse by malicious actors. In such complex situations, identifying which elements caused an adverse outcome, the problem of cause selection, is a critical first step for establishing liability. This paper investigates folk perceptions of causal responsibility in causal chain structures when AI systems are involved in harmful outcomes. We conduct human experiments to examine judgments of causality, blame, foreseeability, and counterfactual reasoning. Our findings show that: (1) When AI agency was moderate (human sets the goal, AI determines the means) or high (AI sets the goal and the means), participants attributed greater causal responsibility to the AI. However, under low AI agency (where a human sets both a goal and means) participants assigned greater causal responsibility to the human despite their temporal distance from the outcome and despite both agents intended it, suggesting an effect of autonomy; (2) When we reversed roles between human and AI, participants consistently judged the human as more causal, even when both agents perform the same action; (3) The developer, despite being distant in the chain, was judged highly causal, reducing causal attributions to the human user but not to the AI; (4) Decomposing the AI into a large language model and an agentic component showed that the agentic part was judged as more causal in the chain. Overall, our research provides evidence on how people perceive the causal contribution of AI in both misuse and misalignment scenarios, and how these judgments interact with the roles of users and developers, key actors in assigning responsibility. These findings can inform the design of liability frameworks for AI-caused harms and shed light on how intuitive judgments shape social and policy debates surrounding real-world AI-related incidents.

With the growing adoption of artificial intelligence in high-stakes decision-making, identifying the causes of outcomes--particularly failures--and determining who is responsible has become a critical concern. In this work, we examine how well formal definitions of responsibility attribution, grounded in the framework of actual causality, align with human judgments of responsibility. To this end, we conduct a large-scale survey to elicit human judgments of responsibility in multi-agent sequential decision-making scenarios, using a modified version of the card game Goofspiel. We evaluate multiple responsibility attribution methods, assess their alignment with human judgments about responsibility, and identify factors that significantly shape responsibility judgments. While no single responsibility attribution method consistently aligns with human responses, our findings highlight key factors that influence human responsibility judgments, including agent-specific biases and amount of information available to agents during decision-making.

Human decision-making is strongly influenced by cognitive biases, particularly under conditions of uncertainty and risk. While prior work has examined bias in single-step decisions with immediate outcomes and in human interaction with a single autonomous agent, comparatively little attention has been paid to decision-making under delayed outcomes involving multiple AI agents, where decisions at each step affect subsequent states. In this work, we study how delayed outcomes shape decision-making and responsibility attribution in a multi-agent human-AI task. Using a controlled game-based experiment, we analyze how participants adjust their behavior following positive and negative outcomes. We observe asymmetric responses to gains and losses, with stronger corrective adjustments after negative outcomes. Importantly, participants often fail to correctly identify the actions that caused failure and misattribute responsibility across AI agents, leading to systematic revisions of decisions that are weakly related to the underlying causes of poor performance. We refer to this phenomenon as a form of attribution bias, manifested as biased error attribution under delayed feedback. Our findings highlight how cognitive biases can be amplified in human-AI systems with delayed outcomes and multiple autonomous agents, underscoring the need for decision-support systems that better support causal understanding and learning over time.