





















Abstract:Large Language Model interfaces are increasingly verbose, exposing intermediate reasoning traces alongside final answers. Traces are framed as transparency mechanisms, yet it is unclear how people use them to solve problems. We report a preregistered between-subjects study (N = 559) in which participants solved ten LSAT-style reasoning problems under one of three conditions: an Answer-only baseline, a Full-trace revealed before the answer, and a Summary-trace presented alongside the answer. Summaries preserved task performance at the no-trace baseline while significantly elevating trust and hedonic appeal, establishing that trace exposure shifts subjective appraisal of the interaction without bringing performance benefits. Under an open-weight reasoning model exposing verbose intermediate output, full traces additionally impaired performance relative to the answer-only baseline. Across all conditions, participants substantially overestimated their performance, and no trace format supported calibrated self-evaluation. Further analysis indicates that hedonic appeal, not trust, carries the indirect path to overestimation, consistent with a processing-fluency account. Reasoning traces are best understood as user-facing interface artifacts rather than transparent windows into model cognition, and calibration is unlikely to emerge from the traces themselves and may best be scaffolded by interactions that elicit users' own reasoning first.
| Comments: | 27 pages, 5 figures, 9 tables |
| Subjects: | Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.25856 [cs.HC] |
| (or arXiv:2605.25856v1 [cs.HC] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.25856 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
From: Daniela Fernandes [view email]
[v1]
Mon, 25 May 2026 13:46:04 UTC (20,928 KB)
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理,仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。