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https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/yk25n_v1…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.
At the same time, our experiments highlight the ease with which individuals adopt AI-generated suggestions without scrutiny. These findings raise important questions about how decision-makers engage with AI under conditions of uncertainty or error. For example, in contexts such as financial advice, medical triage, or legal decision support, uncritical evaluation of System 3 could result in significant harm and a lack of personal accountability for serious life outcomes. In therapeutic contexts, conversational AI may amplify delusional beliefs in vulnerable users, a risk termed ‘AI psychosis’ (Hudon & Stip, 2025).