Public perception of accuracy-fairness trade-offs in algorithmic decisions in the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The naive approach to preventing discrimination in algorithmic decision-making is to exclude protected attributes from the model's inputs. This approach, known as "equal treatment," aims to treat all individuals equally regardless of their demographic characteristics. However, this practice can still result in unequal impacts across different groups. Recently, alternative notions of fairness have been proposed to reduce unequal impact. However, these alternative approaches may require sacrificing predictive accuracy. The present research investigates public attitudes toward these trade-offs in the United States. When are individuals more likely to support equal treatment algorithms (ETAs), characterized by higher predictive accuracy, and when do they prefer equal impact algorithms (EIAs) that reduce performance gaps between groups? A randomized conjoint experiment and a follow-up choice experiment revealed that support for the EIAs decreased sharply as their accuracy gap grew, although impact parity was prioritized more when ETAs produced large outcome discrepancies. Additionally, preferences polarized along partisan identities, with Democrats favoring impact parity over accuracy maximization while Republicans displayed the reverse preference. Gender and social justice orientations also significantly predicted EIA support. Overall, findings demonstrate multidimensional drivers of algorithmic fairness attitudes, underscoring divisions around equality versus equity principles. Achieving standards around fair AI requires addressing conflicting human values through good governance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".