Don't always trust your gut. We're an AI chatbot. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

As useful as AI tools like chat GPT may be, there's concern about how relying on them could affect human thinking.

New research from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania shows we are increasingly deferring to AI.

It's a phenomenon they call cognitive surrender.

Postdoctoral researcher Steve Shaw is a co-author of the report. He says decision-making was

historically broken down into either reactive instinct or more logical deliberation. But now there's

a new factor, artificial intelligence. So we designed a pretty

clever study where we manipulated the accuracy of chat GPT on the back end, so the participants

didn't know this. And, you know, we thought that in certain circumstances, people are actually

sort of cognitively surrendering

and letting AI think for them. And so there are a lot of interesting consequences of that.

And so we wanted to try to find a mechanism for these kind of effects.

Before we get into kind of your methodology and your findings, I first wanted to ask you to

sort of briefly explain some ideas that are foundational to your research, this concept of

thinking fast and slow, which is really central to the whole discipline of behavioral economics and which you build on.

What is meant by this?

Fast thinking is this intuitive, automatic-type thinking system we have, and slow thinking is more deliberative, like critical thinking.

And one of the key arguments we were making here is that that's no longer enough to describe the way that we make judgments and decisions in the world.

And so we include now artificial cognition, System 3, basically AI.

And with the access to AI, we can allow artificial cognition or AI to sort of think for us.

And how did you go about testing your hypothesis?

So we had participants come into the lab.

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