Relying on AI to perform tasks may not reduce our cognitive abilities, but it may undermine our confidence in our own independent reasoning and ownership of ideas, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association.
The study involved 1,923 adult online participants from the United States and Canada who were instructed to use a commercially available AI program to complete 10 simulated work tasks, including creating plans with incomplete or evolving information, interpreting ambiguous data, and clarifying inferences for strategic decisions.
After the task, 58% of participants agreed that “the AI did most of the thinking” to complete the task, especially in activities related to planning and sequencing. These participants also reported decreased confidence in their own independent reasoning, decreased perceived ownership of ideas, and a trade-off between task speed and depth of thinking. Men reported greater reliance on AI than women.
However, participants who actively revised, challenged, or rejected the AI’s suggestions reported greater confidence and a stronger sense of authorship, said study author and MBA Sarah Baldeo, a PhD candidate in AI and neuroscience at Middlesex University in the UK.
“The issue was not the use of AI itself, but the extent to which it was passively accepted,” she says. “Participants who maintained monitoring and active judgment while using AI tended to be more confident in their reasoning.”
The study was published in the online journal Technology, Mind, and Behavior. The study results are correlational and cannot prove causation.
AI programs should be developed in a way that encourages users not to rely too heavily on AI content, but to consider their own alternatives and reconsider their assumptions, the article said.
“In general, the best way to use AI is to train it, not have it train you,” Baldeo says. “Let’s program it to work for a specific purpose and stop anthropomorphizing it.”
Baldeo offered other tips:
- Try solving the problem yourself before asking an AI program to do the work for you.
- Refining your AI prompts at least two or three times will give you higher quality responses and also leverage your own cognitive abilities.
- Take at least two to three days a week off from using AI programs at work to avoid the risk of “intellectual flattening,” where overusing an AI program makes it sound linguistically like AI.
“The potential long-term risk is not that AI will make people less intelligent, but that some users may become less engaged in the deep cognitive tasks that generate novel thinking,” Baldeo said. “That’s why the distinction between AI assistance and overreliance is so important.”
Article: “Generative AI Reliance and Attenuation of Executive Function: Behavioral Evidence of Cognitive Offload in Adult Frequent Users”, Sarah Baldeo, Middlesex University MBA, Technology, Mind, Behavior. Published online on April 16, 2026.
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