The Impact of Culture on Human-AI Collaboration in a Decision-Making Task: A Comparison Between North Americans and South Asians
Riley Schwanz, Elizabeth L. Fox, Tiffany Lui, Gene M. Alarcon, August Capiola · International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction · 2026
Researchers have recently discovered cross cultural differences in cognition. There is evidence supporting that different cultures have different attitudes toward technology and artificial intelligence (AI). Due to the recency of this research, there are gaps in the literature including a lack of understanding the underlying cultural dimensions that influence cognition and focus on global regions that have received little attention from researchers. We examined cultural differences between South Asians and North Americans in relation to eye tracking, performance, and interaction with AI in a visual search decision-making (DM) task, which was based on Navon’s paradigm. Participants completed a DM task consisting of congruent and incongruent local and global stimuli. We implemented high (80%) and low (60%) accuracy AI as a decision aid. Overall, the results indicated that South Asians portrayed poorer performance, especially within more difficult trials including the low accuracy AI and the incongruent trials.