On the Same Page: Dimensions of Perceived Shared Understanding in Human-AI Interaction

Shared understanding plays a key role in the effective communication in and performance of human-human interactions. With the increasingly common integration of AI into human contexts, the future of personal and workplace interactions will see a greater prevalence of human-AI interaction (HAII) in which the perception of shared understanding (PSU) will be important. Existing literature has addressed the processes and effects of PSU in human-human interactions, but the construal remains underexplored in HAII. To better understand PSU in that context, we conducted an online survey to collect user reflections on interactions with a large-language model when its understanding of a situation was thought to be similar or different from the participant's. Through inductive thematic analysis, we identified eight dimensions comprising PSU in human-AI interactions. The descriptive framework we derive supports an operational characterization of PSU and serves as a springboard for future work into the phenomenon.