When it comes to tools based on large language models, there are generally two broad categories of users. On one side are those who treat AI as a powerful but sometimes flawed service that needs careful human oversight and review to detect reasoning or factual flaws in responses. On the other side are those who habitually outsource their critical thinking to what they consider an all-knowing machine.
Recent research goes a long way toward forming a new psychological framework for that second group, which regularly engages in “cognitive surrender” to the seemingly authoritative responses of AI. That research also provides an experimental examination of when and why people are willing to outsource their critical thinking to AI, and how factors such as time pressure and external incentives may affect that decision.
Ask the answering machine.
In “Fast, Slow, and Artificial Thinking: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender.” Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania sought to build on existing studies that describe two broad categories of decision making: one made up of “rapid, intuitive, and affective processing” (System 1); and one formed by “slow, deliberative and analytical reasoning” (System 2). The researchers argue that the emergence of artificial intelligence systems has created a new third category of “artificial cognition” in which decisions are driven by “external, automated, data-driven reasoning that originates in algorithmic systems rather than the human mind.”
