Perceptions of Justice By Algorithms

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence and algorithms are increasingly able to replace human workers in cognitively sophisticated tasks, including ones related to justice. Many governments and international organizations are discussing policies related to the application of algorithmic judges in courts. In this paper, we investigate the public perceptions of algorithmic judges. Across two experiments (N = 1,822), and an internal meta-analysis (N = 3,039), our results show that even though court users acknowledge several advantages of algorithms (i.e., cost and speed), they trust human judges more and have greater intentions to go to the court when a human (vs. an algorithmic) judge adjudicates.