Faculty Publications

Chatbot or Humanaut? How the Source of Advice Impacts Prosocial Behavior

Document Type

Article

Keywords

Advice, Algorithm aversion, Chatbots, GenAI, LLMs, Prosociality, Text analysis

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics

Volume

121

Abstract

This paper explores how the source of advice – human or generative AI (genAI) – relates to behavior in three classic bargaining games commonly used to assess prosociality and cooperative welfare gains. Utilizing a novel experiment, we show that the source of advice matters. While both sources of advice increased prosociality, players preferred human advice over that from genAI and were more willing to pay for it. Prosocial behavior was more prevalent when players received human advice — advice increased the probability of adopting the Pareto-optimal strategy by 14% in the stag hunt and boosted contributions of 19% to the public goods game and 8% in dictator. Leveraging language AI advances, we demonstrate that the advice corpora differ significantly. Humans were more objective, specific, intuitive, and norm-oriented; genAI offered guided reasoning and targeted concepts of risk and strategy. Entities adopting genAI technologies should balance AI agency with human oversight and judgment, mindful of behavioral salience and moral credibility.

Department

Department of Management

Original Publication Date

3-1-2026

DOI of published version

10.1016/j.socec.2026.102509

Link to Full Text

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