Volume 11 • Issue 2 • PP: 22–32 • 2026
Explaining AI Decisions to Mitigate Cognitive Biases in Human-AI Collaboration
Open Access & Copyright
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by ASPG. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
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Human-AI collaboration can improve decision quality only when users know when to rely on an AI recommendation and when to resist it. Explanations are often proposed as a remedy, but explanation content can also intensify automation bias or reinforce a user’s initial belief. This paper presents a cognitive explanation selection model for mitigating over-reliance and under-reliance in AI-assisted decision tasks. The study compares no explanation, feature-based, contrastive, example-driven, and hybrid explanations across simulated novice, intermediate, and expert decision makers using a public medical decision dataset as the task substrate. The analysis focuses on reliance behaviour rather than on model accuracy alone. The proposed model estimates when the user is likely to accept a wrong recommendation, reject a correct recommendation, or accept advice simply because it confirms an initial judgment. The results indicate that contrastive and hybrid explanations are more effective for reducing automation bias, while example-driven explanations preserve trust for lower-expertise users. The paper concludes with a transparent interface loop for high-stakes environments in which explanation style is selected according to user expertise, AI confidence, and human-AI agreement.
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References
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