Existing scholarship outlines two broad categories of decision-making:

#1 - fast, intuitive, and affective (emotional) processing

#2 - slow, deliberative, and analytical reasoning

Scholars now see a third system - uncritical outsourcing to AI.

#AI

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/research-finds-ai-users-scarily-willing-to-surrender-their-cognition-to-llms/

"Cognitive surrender" leads AI users to abandon logical thinking, research finds

Experiments show large majorities uncritically accepting "faulty" AI answers.

Ars Technica

@mimarek There's a ~15 minute interview with the paper's authors here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdIqsbtqhcA

An interesting detail from their experiment is that they manipulated ChatGPT's responses to be less accurate in some cases.

That might be a useful hiring tool in the age of #AI, where employees are expected to use AI, but you want to filter for the ones that understand or verify the output vs blindly trust it and adopt it as their own work.

Is AI Replacing Human Thinking? The Rise of "Cognitive Surrender"

YouTube