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The A(I) Team: Effects of Human-Likeness and Conformity to Gender Stereotypes on Initial Trust and Willingness to Work With an AI Teammate
Citation. Mirowska, A., & Arsenyan, J. (2025). The A(I) Team: Effects of Human-Likeness and Conformity to Gender Stereotypes on Initial Trust and Willingness to Work With an AI Teammate. Journal of Organizational Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.70009
Summary. Across three randomized vignette experiments (total N = 1,155), this study tests how an AI teammate’s visual human-likeness and gender-stereotype conformity shape eeriness, initial trust, and willingness to add it to an all-human workplace team. Human-like representations produced lower eeriness and greater initial trust and acceptance than cartoon-like representations; stereotype effects depended on the occupational context. The study frames initial AI-teammate acceptance as a social-categorization process rather than a direct consequence of human-likeness alone.
Key claims
- In Study 1, a more human-like potential AI teammate was associated with lower eeriness, higher initial trust, and greater willingness to have it join an all-human team than a cartoon-like representation.
- Across Studies 2 and 3, gender labels alone did not determine initial reactions, but gender-temperament stereotype incongruity altered eeriness differently in masculine-coded logistics and feminine-coded social-work contexts.
- Initial trust consistently mediated the link between eeriness reactions and willingness to accept the AI teammate.
Evidence & limitations
- The evidence consists of three between-subject, randomly assigned vignette experiments (N = 239, 513, and 403) using prospective workplace-team scenarios.
- The measures concern initial dyadic judgments of a depicted teammate rather than real interaction, team-level trust, or downstream team performance; the authors did not directly measure the proposed prototype-matching mechanism.
- The stimuli and temperament descriptions were constrained, including a visually Caucasian agent despite an intended ethnically ambiguous depiction, which limits generalizability across appearances, contexts, and team compositions.