How self-perceived reputation affects fairness towards humans and artificial intelligence

Investigating how much people extend “human-human interaction” rules (such as fairness) to artificial intelligence within CMC seems of great importance given the widespread presence of artificial agents in our daily lives. As to do so, we designed an experiment based on a customized version of the Ultimatum Game (UG) online in which we introduced and explored the role of self-perceived reputation in influencing people's fairness towards other human beings and two types of artificial agents, namely artificial intelligence and random bots. We found that humans show the tendency to extend real-life psychological dynamics even towards artificial entities. Moreover, when a reputation is attributed to them, men and women behave differently adopting alternatively two well-known psychological phenomena deriving from Self-Perception theory and Behavioral Compensation.