Doctor, meet AI: How AI systems influence human decision-making in healthcare

How does AI change the way doctors and therapists make decisions – and how do patients feel about it? Together with Julia Cecil, Selina Angerer, Eesha Kokje, Susanne Gaube, and Eva Lermer, I wrote an article for a broad audience in the special issue on artificial intelligence of In-Mind Magazine (Issue 08/2026).

What the article covers

• Where AI is already used: Radiology was an early adopter, with hundreds of AI tools on the European market. Mental healthcare lags behind – in our product review, only seven AI applications had regulatory clearance, even though the number of patents is rising.
• What drives acceptance: trust, the expected usefulness and ease of use of AI, social influence, and the fit with clinical workflows ( meta-analysis); practitioners’ learning intentions and ethical knowledge ( survey study); and, for patients, costs, expertise, and privacy ( conjoint study).
• How AI shapes decisions: People sometimes appreciate algorithms and sometimes avoid them – often after seeing an AI make a mistake – and they forgive human errors more readily than machine errors.
• What can go wrong: automation bias, biased training data, and models whose performance degrades when the data they encounter changes.

Our take-home message

Two principles should guide the use of AI in healthcare: calibrated trust – relying on AI as much as its actual performance warrants (the article compares this to using a GPS) – and human oversight, treating AI like a promising new intern rather than a replacement. Humans should stay in the driver’s seat, with patient care at the center.

Read the article

Cecil, J., Angerer, S., Kokje, E., Gaube, S., Kleine, A.-K., & Lermer, E. (2026). Doctor, meet AI: How AI systems influence human decision-making in healthcare. In-Mind Magazine, Issue 08/2026. Read on in-mind.org