University of Missouri · Department of Philosophy
St Louis University High · Department of Mathematics

Did Your Doctor Use AI in Med School? Effects of Disclosed AI Use During Training on Trust in Experts

A growing share of professional competence is acquired with the help of AI. We ask what happens to trust when patients find out: told that a board-certified physician used AI tools during training, with every credential held fixed, do people trust that doctor less, and if so, why?

Fernando Alvear^1,2 & Philip Robbins¹

¹Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO ²Department of Mathematics, Saint Louis University High, Saint Louis, MO

falvear@missouri.edu · robbinsp@missouri.edu

Read the work

View the poster & comment → Studies 1 and 2 in full: design, results, and what mediates the effect. Presented at ISMP 2026. Read it as it is, or turn on commenting to leave the authors a note. The analyses → Every rendered report behind the poster: data cleaning, ANOVAs, and mediation models. 🔒 Password protected — authors only.

The project

Prior work asks how patients react to AI used at the point of care. We ask a different question: whether learning that an expert's competence was developed with AI assistance changes how much that expert is trusted. Participants recruited on Prolific read a vignette about a doctor who recently finished training, with the training history manipulated between subjects, and then rated their comfort and confidence along with the doctor's ability, benevolence, integrity, and autonomy of judgment: Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman's model of trust, extended with a fourth dimension for independence of thought.

Study 1Used AI / did not use AI / no information, cardiologist scenario. N = 216.
Study 2Adds a peer-tutor arm, to separate a penalty for AI specifically from a penalty for any outside help. N = 335.
MethodPreregistered. One-way ANOVA with corrected pairwise contrasts, then parallel mediation (PROCESS model 4, 10,000 bootstrap samples).