The Awareness Trap

Abstract

This examination evaluates Article 14 (Human Oversight) and Article 26 (Duties of Deployers) of the EU AI Act against empirical psychological research on automation bias and cognitive complacency. The analysis demonstrates that statutory mandates requiring human operators to remain aware of automation bias while understanding system limits, detecting anomalies, interpreting outputs correctly, and overriding recommendations under time pressure demand psychological capabilities that humans cannot sustain during routine operations. As systems become more reliable, attention predictably withdraws, making the specific failures the law expects humans to catch harder to detect. The result is a compliance structure that can document training, designation, and procedural effort without delivering protection to the individual decision subject.