Berkeley J. Dietvorst

Who they are

Dietvorst wrote the paper with J. P. Simmons and C. Massey at the University of Pennsylvania, and it was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Across five studies, participants who had seen a forecasting algorithm perform became less confident in it and less likely to tie their incentives to it rather than to an inferior human forecaster. That held even after they had watched the algorithm outperform the human.

The finding became one side of a longer argument. In 2019 Jennifer Logg and colleagues reported that lay people followed advice more closely when it was attributed to an algorithm, and Noah Castelo and colleagues found that reliance on algorithms depends on how subjective the task seems.

Key papers

Dietvorst, B. J., Simmons, J. P., & Massey, C. (2015). "Algorithm aversion: people erroneously avoid algorithms after seeing them err." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(1), 114-126. doi:10.1037/xge0000033.

Key ideas

See Algorithm Aversion.

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