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

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.