As a result of rapid advancements in AI technology we increasingly interact with algorithms in our daily lives. As these interactions become more and more human-like, social aspects of human-AI interactions become more and more important. In this project you will investigate how people are able to “read” intentions in the behaviour of algorithms.
Your job We rely on the psychological literature on how people infer intentions from the behaviour of other humans to see whether people take an “intentional stance” to understand the behaviour of algorithms. A better understanding of how people interpret the behaviour of algorithms is crucial for understanding when people dare to trust and rely on algorithms in their daily lives.
The project has two main objectives:
- advancing a psychological model that offers a systematic insight into how intentions are inferred from behaviour; and
- testing how perceived intentionality of AI agents changes the dynamics of human-AI interactions, potentially making those interactions more closely resemble human-human interactions.
We are looking for someone who can conduct research and strengthen our research project. The research is embedded in the
research theme "Cognition and Social Behaviour", which includes the
Goallab that combines fundamental and applied approaches to study human cognition and motivation in social contexts. Moreover, within our university, our group collaborates with other disciplines within the interdisciplinary strategic themes '
Institutions for Open Societies' and '
Dynamics of Youth' and the Focus area '
Human-Centered AI'.
To allow PhD candidates to gain experiences with teaching, the PhD position also includes teaching (min. 10%, but more is possible on request of the candidate). The teaching is implemented in the Psychology programme offered by the Social, Health and Organisational Psychology group. Our group is committed to team science and practices Open Science.
Furthermore, the tasks and responsibilities include:
- conducting research (literature research, designing experiments, collecting and analysing data, reporting the results), resulting in international scientific publications and a dissertation;
- presenting results at national and international scientific conferences;
- teaching in the psychology programme (min. 10%);
- active participation in the research group of the project and of the department;
- ambition to collaborate with and visit international partners in research.