Balancing the Unknown: Exploring Human Reliance on AI Advice under Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly support decision-making across a broad range of domains. The complexity of real-world tasks, however, introduces uncertainty into the prediction capabilities of these systems. This uncertainty can manifest as aleatoric uncertainty arising from inherent variability in outcomes or epistemic uncertainty stemming from limitations in the AI system’s knowledge. While prior research has investigated uncertainty as a monolithic concept, the distinct effects of communicating aleatoric or epistemic uncertainty on humans and their reliance behavior remain unexplored. In this work, we present two behavioral experiments that systematically examine how participants rely on AI advice when faced with different types of uncertainty. While the first experiment manipulates the source of uncertainty, specifying it as either aleatoric or epistemic, the second decomposes uncertainty into its individual components, presenting aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty simultaneously. This work contributes to a deeper understanding of the multifaceted impact of different uncertainty types on human–AI interaction.

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