ChatGPT answered reasoning and knowledge questions in a University of Pennsylvania study with 359 participants. When its answers were wrong, users still followed them 79.8% of the time; the chatbot's confident output suppressed participants' own reasoning on roughly four out of five trials.
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Expert: Steven Shaw & Gideon Nave, Researchers, University of Pennsylvania In a University of Pennsylvania study (SSRN preprint 6097646), researchers Steven Shaw and Gideon Nave found that participants overwhelmingly followed ChatGPT's answers even when the answers were wrong. Across a series of reasoning and knowledge questions, more than half of participants chose to use ChatGPT even though using it was optional. In the most striking experiment (359 participants), people followed the chatbot's correct advice 92.7% of the time — and still followed its wrong advice 79.8% of the time. As the researchers wrote: "While override rates were substantially higher on AI-Faulty than AI-Accurate trials, participants followed faulty AI recommendations on roughly four out of five chat-engaged trials." The authors call this pattern "cognitive surrender": users adopt the AI's answers and even report higher confidence in them, overriding their own intuition and deliberation. The findings line up with an October 2025 BBC/EBU study cited in the article, which found even the most advanced chatbots give wrong answers 45% of the time on news content. The practical takeaway: verify AI output against primary sources before acting on it, especially for high-stakes decisions. "The capacity to think critically, the capacity to be able to check what the AI is giving you has become more and more important over time," co-author Gideon Nave said. Source: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/study-do-what-chatgpt-tells-us
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