The Decoy Dilemma in Online Medical Information Evaluation: A Comparative Study of Credibility Assessments by LLM and Human Judges

Can AI be cognitively biased in automated information judgment tasks? Despite recent progresses in measuring and mitigating social and algorithmic biases in AI and large language models (LLMs), it is not clear to what extent LLMs behave "rationally", or if they are also vulnerable to human cognitive bias triggers. To address this open problem, our study, consisting of a crowdsourcing user experiment and a LLM-enabled simulation experiment, compared the credibility assessments by LLM and human judges under potential decoy effects in an information retrieval (IR) setting, and empirically examined the extent to which LLMs are cognitively biased in COVID-19 medical (mis)information assessment tasks compared to traditional human assessors as a baseline. The results, collected from a between-subject user experiment and a LLM-enabled replicate experiment, demonstrate that 1) Larger and more recent LLMs tend to show a higher level of consistency and accuracy in distinguishing credible information from misinformation. However, they are more likely to give higher ratings for misinformation due to the presence of a more salient, decoy misinformation result; 2) While decoy effect occurred in both human and LLM assessments, the effect is more prevalent across different conditions and topics in LLM judgments compared to human credibility ratings. In contrast to the generally assumed "rationality" of AI tools, our study empirically confirms the cognitive bias risks embedded in LLM agents, evaluates the decoy impact on LLMs against human credibility assessments, and thereby highlights the complexity and importance of debiasing AI agents and developing psychology-informed AI audit techniques and policies for automated judgment tasks and beyond.