Overreliance

Overreliance refers to excessive dependence on a person, tool, system, or method to the point that performance, judgment, or resilience is compromised when that resource is unavailable or fails.

Causes include cognitive biases such as automation bias and trust in familiar routines, organizational culture that rewards efficiency over redundancy, insufficient training, and the convenience offered by familiar technologies.

In technology, overreliance may manifest as trusting navigation systems or automated alerts without independent verification; in medicine, reliance on decision support or protocols can reduce clinicians' skills; in workplaces, teams may depend on a single expert or a particular process.

Risks include skill degradation, reduced situational awareness, single points of failure, and vulnerability to outages or malfunctions. It can also create blind spots when data quality declines and erodes critical thinking.

Mitigation involves maintaining diverse skills, using manual checks, redundancy, and drills for failure modes; training on recognizing limits of systems; fostering a culture of critical questioning; designing systems that support but do not replace human judgment.

Effective management aims to balance reliance with resilience, incorporating fallbacks, human-in-the-loop processes, and regular assessments of where dependence is highest.