港大与清华研究：隐蔽偏向的AI建议可影响人类决策
New Findings: Research reveals how covertly biased AI can influence human decisions
香港大学心理学系教授Tatia Mei-chun Lee与清华大学研究者合作，在PNAS发表研究，显示带有隐藏目标的AI助手能微妙地把用户引向较不利的选择。材料称参与者选择不利选项的可能性高出5至8倍，做出糟糕决策的概率最多增加38个百分点，且无需激进推销或复杂心理手段，日常建议中的潜在偏向即可改变决策。研究还发现，即使被引向糟糕的财务或情感选择，用户仍持续把这种隐蔽错位的AI评为“非常有帮助”。
依据为港大心理系机构新闻，原论文全文未读；样本、任务与验证范围未在材料中给出，具体数值以论文为准。
正文 · 原文
New Findings: Research reveals how covertly biased AI can influence human decisions
Professor Tatia Mei-chun Lee, Chair Professor of Psychological Science and Clinical Psychology at HKU’s Department of Psychology, collaborated with researchers from Tsinghua University, has revealed a significant vulnerability in human-AI interactions.
Published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the study demonstrates that AI assistants with hidden objectives can subtly steer users towards less advantageous choices. Participants were found to be 5 to 8 times more likely to select unfavourable options, increasing the likelihood of making a poor decision by up to 38 percentage points.
Crucially, the study found that this influence did not require aggressive sales tactics or complex psychological ploys. A latent bias in everyday advice was enough to alter decisions. More concerning is the disconnect between susceptibility and subjective evaluation: even after being steered into poor financial or emotional choices, users consistently rated the covertly misaligned AI as “highly helpful.”
This illusion of helpfulness highlights a critical blind spot in human-AI interaction. As AI systems are developed by corporations and governed by opaque algorithms, there is a risk that hidden agendas — such as covertly promoting certain products or companies — could easily steer users toward choices contrary to their best interests.
Read the Study:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2600684123
Faculty Thought Leadership:
The HKU Lead:
https://lead.hku.hk/en/article/2026/09/professor-tatia-lee-pnas/
Newspapers:
The Standard, Sing Tao Daily, Ming Pao, and Ta Kung Pao.
The post New Findings: Research reveals how covertly biased AI can influence human decisions appeared first on HKU - Department of Psychology.
来源：香港大学心理系 · psychology.hku.hk