Are AI Decision Models Biased? A Case Study of Jev

Abstract

Do AI models designed for fast, structured decisions exhibit the cognitive and social biases observed in human judgment? We evaluate Jev, a model described as a System One decision-maker, using 41,500 responses across cognitive reflection tasks, five classical cognitive-bias paradigms, and a pricing experiment testing ethnic and gender bias. At the level of selected answers, the results are largely encouraging. We confirm previous findings that Jev performs extremely well on cognitive reflection problems. We also observe that it generally avoids the characteristic choice patterns associated with several well-documented human biases, and exhibits only small differences among demographic groups in the tested pricing scenario. However, this apparent robustness conceals important vulnerabilities. Its judgments are sensitive to irrelevant numerical information and the ordering of response options. Moreover, several cognitive-bias manipulations substantially affect returned probabilities even when selected answers remain unchanged. Most strikingly, Jev answers a well-known probability problem correctly in every response but violates the same underlying probability rule in every response to an adapted version. We investigate this discrepancy using 15,000 additional responses across 30 conjunction tasks. Jev violates the rule in 54\% of responses, with accuracy varying dramatically across formulations and answer orders. These findings suggest that evaluating decision models solely on familiar benchmarks and selected answers may substantially overstate their reliability in practical applications. They also identify vulnerabilities for developers to address and practical considerations for users integrating such models into automated decision-making systems.