Human Motivation in Competition against Artificial Intelligence: Using One-to-One Games

Abstract

With significant advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), research has examined human-AI interaction. However, little is known about humans’ psychological reactions in competitions against AI. In a previous study, people’s causal attribution was analyzed after losing in a competition against AI in a game demanding logical thinking. This study focuses on individual motivation, especially causal attribution, and extends the existing literature by creating two games in which both ability and luck influence the game outcome. Two conditions were created: in the first, the participants competed against an AI opponent, and in the other, they believed they were competing against another participant. Causal attribution, the expectation of winning the games, and behavioral responses were measured after participants lost in Experiments 1 (N = 571) and 2 (N = 564). The results revealed that the participants attributed their loss to luck more than their own or their opponent’s ability and effort in both conditions. There was no significant difference in the expectation of winning games between the AI and human opponents. However, the participants resisted re-challenging the games against AI compared with human opponents. Although the results cannot be generalized owing to sampling limitations, this study offers novel findings on the subject of human motivation in competition against AI.

Keywords:

• Artificial intelligence
• behavioral response
• causal attribution
• competition game
• motivation

Acknowledgments

We thank Taku Ozaki and Yukihide Shibata for their valuable comments and Editage (www.editage.com) for the English language editing.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest with respect to the authorship or publication of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by a Grant-in-Aid from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Grant Numbers 20J11786 and 22K20306

Notes on contributors

Ryosuke Yokoi

Ryosuke Yokoi is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Comprehensive Psychology, Kyoto Tachibana University. He received his PhD in psychology from Doshisha University in 2022.

Kazuya Nakayachi

Kazuya Nakayachi is a full professor in the Faculty of Psychology, Doshisha University. He received his PhD in psychology from Doshisha University in 2003.