Source: Machinesociety
A controlled experiment by Tan and Nov at NYU Tandon asked 240 adults to interact with chatbots that either showed their "thinking" or simply output answers, probing whether visible deliberation—even if mechanically generated—makes users trust AI systems more. The research isolates a design question: does showing reasoning steps (chain-of-thought outputs, step-by-step breakdowns) increase user confidence independent of actual accuracy, and if so, should it? The gap matters: people want to see the work, but visible reasoning doesn't necessarily correlate with reliability.