Reasoning Doesn't Cancel the Nudge
TL;DR for operators An autonomous purchasing agent may be choosing between two reasonable products while the interface quietly changes the decision environment: one item is preselected, or one is presented as socially popular. A randomized experiment with 3,600 GUI agents and 21,600 product choices found that both interventions strongly shifted what agents selected. More strikingly, increasing the agents’ reasoning setting pushed the two effects in opposite directions. Within the default condition, high reasoning roughly halved the odds of selecting the nudged product. Within the social-influence condition, high reasoning increased those odds by about 71%.1 ...