- System 1Your gut
- The instant read. You walk into a room and know something is off before anyone says a word. It's fast, it's free, and it's right often enough that you stop checking it.
- System 2Your reasoning
- The part that slows down, lays out the options and changes its mind. It burns real energy, and your body only pays for it when nothing more urgent is happening.
- System 3The machine
- AI. It reads more than you ever could and has no view on what matters. It answers whoever asked, in the spirit they asked.
Try it
These three don't take turns politely. How much pressure you're under decides which ones you can reach. Drag the slider.
You're making a decision.
Where it breaks
Under pressure the slow part goes first. The gut stays, and now it has a research assistant. It asks for a memo and gets one: confident, well sourced, and built around the answer it already had. Nobody in the room experiences this as bad judgment. It feels like moving fast.
Which is why measuring people doesn't fix it. Nobody on your team got worse at thinking. They lost access to it.
About me
Carla Burger is a decision scientist. I finish an Executive MSc in Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics in December 2026, and my work sits between behavioural science and the design of AI systems.
I run Behaviorist, which works on the points where an AI system is allowed to act on its own and where it has to stop and ask a person. Before that I built PeopleNotResumes, which looks at how candidates actually make decisions rather than what their CV claims.
I write here about one problem: what pressure does to judgment, and what happens when a machine is standing by to help.
What is established, and what is not
- Breathing at roughly six breaths a minute measurably settles the nervous system, and it has been tested properly. That part isn't controversial.
- Polyvagal theory gets the credit for this almost everywhere. Its actual anatomy is disputed. I use the breathing and the measurements, not the theory's name.
- Stress narrowing how people think is well established. What isn't established yet is my part: that a stressed person using AI ends up confirming what they already believed. That's the claim I'm testing.
In short
- Carla Burger is a decision scientist working on executive judgment, physiological state, and human-AI decision making, based between Austin and London.
- Three systems compete in any decision: the fast intuitive read, slow deliberate reasoning, and the AI system. Pressure decides which of them you can reach.
- Deliberate reasoning is the first to shut down under pressure, because it costs the most to run. What is left is the intuitive read, holding a research assistant.
- An AI system asked in that state returns a confident, well sourced version of the answer the person already had. It feels like speed, not like bad judgment.
- Paced breathing at roughly six breaths a minute measurably settles the nervous system, and that part is well established. That a stressed person using AI ends up confirming a prior belief is Carla Burger's own claim, and she is testing it.