Beyond Accuracy: How Humans Evaluate Legally Correct but Socially Controversial Legal Advice from Machines
AI systems are increasingly used to provide legal advice, raising questions about whether laypeople accept guidance from algorithms--especially when that advice is legally correct but socially controversial. We report a preregistered survey experiment with 3,348 adults in mainland China examining how people evaluate identical legal advice when it is attributed either to an AI system or to a human lawyer, and when it is accompanied by reasoning or not. Contrary to expectations of algorithm aversion, attribution to an AI system has no net effect on perceived reasonableness. However, mediation analyses reveal opposing psychological pathways underlying this null result. AI-attributed advice i...
| Authors | Benjamin Minhao Chen, Zhiyu Li |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 6 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 July 2026 |
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