"I'm Not Sure, But...": Examining the Impact of Large Language Models' Uncertainty Expression on User Reliance and Trust

TL;DR

This study investigates how natural language expressions of uncertainty in large language models influence user reliance, trust, and accuracy, revealing that explicit uncertainty expressions can reduce overreliance and improve decision-making.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the effects of natural language uncertainty expressions in LLMs, highlighting their potential to mitigate overreliance and improve user accuracy.

Findings

First-person uncertainty expressions decrease reliance and increase accuracy.

General perspective uncertainty expressions have weaker, non-significant effects.

Natural language uncertainty communication can effectively reduce overreliance.

Abstract

Widely deployed large language models (LLMs) can produce convincing yet incorrect outputs, potentially misleading users who may rely on them as if they were correct. To reduce such overreliance, there have been calls for LLMs to communicate their uncertainty to end users. However, there has been little empirical work examining how users perceive and act upon LLMs' expressions of uncertainty. We explore this question through a large-scale, pre-registered, human-subject experiment (N=404) in which participants answer medical questions with or without access to responses from a fictional LLM-infused search engine. Using both behavioral and self-reported measures, we examine how different natural language expressions of uncertainty impact participants' reliance, trust, and overall task performance. We find that first-person expressions (e.g., "I'm not sure, but...") decrease participants' confidence in the system and tendency to agree with the system's answers, while increasing participants' accuracy. An exploratory analysis suggests that this increase can be attributed to reduced (but not fully eliminated) overreliance on incorrect answers. While we observe similar effects for uncertainty expressed from a general perspective (e.g., "It's not clear, but..."), these effects are weaker and not statistically significant. Our findings suggest that using natural language expressions of uncertainty may be an effective approach for reducing overreliance on LLMs, but that the precise language used matters. This highlights the importance of user testing before deploying LLMs at scale.