Alert fatigue

Alert fatigue is the desensitization of professionals to automated alerts generated by decision-support systems, occurring when alert volume exceeds cognitive capacity and practitioners begin to override or ignore warnings indiscriminately. The phenomenon is not a user-interface failure but a feedback topology pathology: when a system cries wolf too often, the warning-to-response loop collapses, and the system loses its capacity to govern behavior. Alert fatigue reveals a deeper tension in algorithmic governance — the institutional incentives that produce over-alerting are stronger than the clinical incentives that would constrain it. The phenomenon connects to broader questions about cognitive offloading in professional settings: when does a tool that augments judgment become a tool that replaces it?