When Biased Humans Meet Debiased AI: A Case Study in College Major Recommendation

Currently, there is a surge of interest in fair Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) research which aims to mitigate discriminatory bias in AI algorithms, e.g., along lines of gender, age, and race. While most research in this domain focuses on developing fair AI algorithms, in this work, we examine the challenges which arise when humans and fair AI interact. Our results show that due to an apparent conflict between human preferences and fairness, a fair AI algorithm on its own may be insufficient to achieve its intended results in the real world. Using college major recommendation as a case study, we build a fair AI recommender by employing gender debiasing machine learning techniques. Our offline evaluation showed that the debiased recommender makes fairer career recommendations without sacrificing its accuracy in prediction. Nevertheless, an online user study of more than 200 college students revealed that participants on average prefer the original biased system over the debiased system. Specifically, we found that perceived gender disparity is a determining factor for the acceptance of a recommendation. In other words, we cannot fully address the gender bias issue in AI recommendations without addressing the gender bias in humans. We conducted a follow-up survey to gain additional insights into the effectiveness of various design options that can help participants to overcome their own biases. Our results suggest that making fair AI explainable is crucial for increasing its adoption in the real world.