# The Impact and Feasibility of Self-Confidence Shaping for AI-Assisted Decision-Making

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14311 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14311/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Does the Whole Exceed its Parts? The Effect of AI Explanations on Complementary Team Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14779/) (2020)
- [Effect of Confidence and Explanation on Accuracy and Trust Calibration in AI-Assisted Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02114/) (2020)
- [Evaluating Explainable AI: Which Algorithmic Explanations Help Users Predict Model Behavior?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01831/) (2020)
- [On Human Predictions with Explanations and Predictions of Machine Learning Models: A Case Study on Deception Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07901/) (2018)
- [Appropriate Reliance on AI Advice: Conceptualization and the Effect of Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02187/) (2023)
- [Who Should I Trust: AI or Myself? Leveraging Human and AI Correctness Likelihood to Promote Appropriate Trust in AI-Assisted Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05809/) (2023)
- [ECTSum: A New Benchmark Dataset For Bullet Point Summarization of Long Earnings Call Transcripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12467/) (2022)
- [Do Humans Trust Advice More if it Comes from AI? An Analysis of Human-AI Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07015/) (2021)
- [Uncalibrated Models Can Improve Human-AI Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05983/) (2022)
- ["Are You Really Sure?" Understanding the Effects of Human Self-Confidence Calibration in AI-Assisted Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09552/) (2024)
- [Modeling financial analysts' decision making via the pragmatics and semantics of earnings calls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02868/) (2019)
- [Utilizing Human Behavior Modeling to Manipulate Explanations in AI-Assisted Decision Making: The Good, the Bad, and the Scary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10461/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [AI as Teammate or Tool? A Review of Human-AI Interaction in Decision Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15865/) (2026)
- [Human-Centric Reflective Architecture for Human-AI Collaborative Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03025/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In AI-assisted decision-making, it is crucial but challenging for humans to appropriately rely on AI, especially in high-stakes domains such as finance and healthcare. This paper addresses this problem from a human-centered perspective by presenting an intervention for self-confidence shaping, designed to calibrate self-confidence at a targeted level. We first demonstrate the impact of self-confidence shaping by quantifying the upper-bound improvement in human-AI team performance. Our behavioral experiments with 121 participants show that self-confidence shaping can improve human-AI team performance by nearly 50% by mitigating both over- and under-reliance on AI. We then introduce a self-confidence prediction task to identify when our intervention is needed. Our results show that simple machine-learning models achieve 67% accuracy in predicting self-confidence. We further illustrate the feasibility of such interventions. The observed relationship between sentiment and self-confidence suggests that modifying sentiment could be a viable strategy for shaping self-confidence. Finally, we outline future research directions to support the deployment of self-confidence shaping in a real-world scenario for effective human-AI collaboration.
