{"id":376457,"date":"2026-04-05T15:18:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T15:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/376457\/"},"modified":"2026-04-05T15:18:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T15:18:08","slug":"cognitive-surrender-is-a-new-and-useful-term-for-how-ai-melts-brains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/376457\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Cognitive Surrender\u2019 Is a New and Useful Term for How AI Melts Brains"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kyle Orland of ArsTechnica wrote a blog post<\/a> about the term \u201ccognitive surrender\u201d on April 3. Maybe I should have noticed it sooner<\/a> since it\u2019s been floating around since at least January<\/a>, when it was, it appears, coined in this context by the Wharton Business School marketing researchers Steven Shaw and Gideon Nave. Their paper<\/a> is incredibly troubling, and once you read about these findings, the term \u201ccognitive surrender\u201d will be stuck in your head too.<\/p>\n

If your brain is too gelatinous from offloading your thinking to a chatbot, and now you can\u2019t read about the findings in any detail, here\u2019s a video of the authors talking about them:<\/p>\n

What Shaw and Nave did was give 1,372 people a test, and access to an AI chatbot for help\u2014with the twist that the chatbot sometimes gave wrong answers. The test was an \u201cadapted\u201d version of something called a Cognitive Reflection Test, meaning every question was a certain type of brain-buster you\u2019ve seen before<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?\u201d<\/p>\n

The answer is \u201c5 minutes,\u201d which requires you to use your \u201cslow, deliberative, and analytical reasoning,\u201d rather than your \u201cfast, intuitive, and affective processing.\u201d Your fast intuition might have told you the answer was 100 minutes. These are concepts made famous by a wonderful (if imperfect<\/a>) airport book called Thinking, Fast and Slow by the late Daniel Kahneman.<\/p>\n

The results of the test were, of course, horrifying. Though I should add before we go any further that you should read up on the replication crisis<\/a> before you take the results of any experiment as gospel. The validity of experimental results, especially in psychology, has sometimes been called into question over the past few years because they can\u2019t be replicated. That\u2019s not to say I noticed problems with these authors\u2019 work (I\u2019m far from qualified to do so anyway), just a trend worth flagging.<\/p>\n

At any rate, in the part of the study where the subjects were allowed to consult the chatbot, they did so about half the time. When it gave correct answers, they accepted them 93 percent of the time. Unfortunately, when it was wrong, they accepted answers 80 percent of the time. And keep in mind, they didn\u2019t have to use it at all. They let the bad advice trump their own brains. Even worse, those who used AI rated their confidence 11.7 percent higher than those who didn\u2019t, even though it was wrong.<\/p>\n

The authors write that in addition to Kahneman\u2019s fast and slow \u201csystems\u201d of cognition, this new artificial crutch is creating what they call \u201cSystem 3.\u201d<\/p>\n

The authors write:<\/p>\n

Our findings demonstrate that people readily incorporate AI-generated outputs into their decision-making processes, often with minimal friction or skepticism. This seamless engagement with System 3 underscores its potential to enhance everyday cognition by reducing cognitive effort, accelerating decisions, and supplementing or substituting internal cognition with externally processed, vastly resourced, AI-powered insights.<\/p>\n

Cognitive surrender isn\u2019t necessarily all bad in their view. It \u201cillustrates the value and integration of System 3, but also highlights the vulnerability of System 3 usage.\u201d<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first time the phrase cognitive surrender has existed. The theologian Peter Berger used it in a religious context<\/a> in the 1990s, but it meant something more like surrendering faith in God to relieve cognitive dissonance. And if you\u2019re like me, you\u2019ve probably noticed that AI-assisted cognitive surrender looks like older forms of mental laziness.<\/p>\n

On the classic sitcom Home Improvement, for instance, Tim \u201cThe Toolman\u201d Taylor used to ask his neighbor Wilson for advice every week when some situation in his life couldn\u2019t be resolved with \u201cmore power.\u201d The sagely Wilson would intone some dusty old piece of wisdom from the ancient ones, and Tim would always completely accept it.<\/p>\n

But one might argue that Tim was just using Wilson as yet another time-saving \u201ctool\u201d (if you will), and that he was performing his own bit of cognitive surrender without AI. Wilson\u2019s advice may have been sound, but when Tim tried to repeat it, he would mangle it so horribly that it frequently called into question whether he had performed any cognitive reflection at all, or had indeed just relied on his fast, intuitive system, and accepted Wilson\u2019s intelligence blindly.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps soon, AI will turn us into a society of Tim Taylors, cognitively surrendering to our AI Wilsons. I can think of worse fates than that for our species.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kyle Orland of ArsTechnica wrote a blog post about the term \u201ccognitive surrender\u201d on April 3. Maybe I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":376458,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,5073,85,46,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-376457","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-cognition","12":"tag-il","13":"tag-israel","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/376458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}