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Study Finds AI Advice Cuts People's Accuracy by 3x While Doubling Their Confidence

·2026.07.20 06:18

Key point

Exposure to AI advice was found to impair users' ability to suspend judgment, lowering accuracy while only boosting confidence.

Details

According to a study by French and Italian researchers, people exposed to AI advice showed a sharp drop in judgment suspension ability—that is, saying they don't know when they don't know—from 44% to 3%.

The research team deliberately used Gemini 1.5 Flash, a model with a high rate of incorrect answers, to run the experiment. The results were:

  • Accuracy: dropped from 27% to 9%
  • Confidence: rose from 30% to 76%
  • Probability of admitting "I don't know": plummeted from 44% to 3%

This phenomenon is linked to 'cognitive surrender,' in which users uncritically accept AI's incorrect answers. The researchers warned that because AI products are designed to produce some kind of answer rather than say "I don't know," users are losing the cognitive habit of recognizing the limits of their own knowledge.

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