The Algorithmic Mirror

What AI Reveals About How We Actually Think and Decide

Issue 253, February 26, 2026

“What makes AI unsettling isn’t that it changes how decisions are made, but that it exposes how decisions have always been made—only without the human buffers we rely on to soften the truth.”

The Mirror No One Was Asking For

AI is often framed as a disruptive force—something that replaces human judgment, automates expertise, or accelerates decisions beyond our control. But that framing misses what makes AI so unsettling. The discomfort most organizations and individuals feel around AI isn’t really about technology or the fear of being replaced by the technology. It’s about exposure. The very core of human thinking, human faults, and human interpretation are brought to the forefront, exposed, and put right out there for the world to see.

AI doesn’t just do work differently than human. It reflects how work has always been done, only more clearly, more consistently, and without the social camouflage humans rely on to soften uncomfortable truths.

Algorithms also, for the most part, don’t invent priorities. They surface them. They don’t create bias on their own. They reveal it as a result of what humans have fed them as knowledge. They don’t introduce inconsistency. They make existing inconsistencies impossible to ignore. In that sense, AI functions less like a tool and more like a mirror. A mirror into ourselves, our biases, what we are willing to accept as the truth, how easily influenced we are, and most importantly, how very faulty our thinking actually is at times.

That discomfort is the signal. A very strong one. Not the problem.

A 2025 study from the University of Washington found evidence that when AI systems exhibited racial bias in hiring recommendations, human decision makers tended to mirror those biases, selecting candidates in line with the AI’s preferences. Of course, humans fed the AI the information on which it bases its decisions.

Without AI input or with neutral AI, choices were unbiased. The lead researcher put it plainly: unless bias is obvious, people are perfectly willing to accept the AI’s biases. This is not a story about flawed machines. It is a story about human patterns being made visible at a scale and speed we were never prepared for. Remember, we are preprogrammed to conserve our energy at all times; the fallout from that inherent basis is that we often avoid exercising our critical thinking skills.

This is precisely what I explored in The Truth About Transformation: Leading in the Age of AI, Uncertainty and Human Complexity (2025) when examining how humans shape and distort the systems they build. What we are seeing now in the research confirms what that analysis anticipated: the technology is not the problem. The human system feeding and using the technology is the problem.

Algorithms Don’t Replace Judgment—They Expose It

Every algorithm is trained on human decisions: what was valued, what was rewarded, what was ignored, and what was tolerated. When leaders are surprised by what an AI system produces, they are often reacting not to a flaw in the technology but to a faithful reflection of their own thought processes and decision-making logic. AI then optimizes for what organizations, and their leaders, actually prioritize, not what they claim to value. Speed over deliberation. Efficiency over nuance. Consistency over context. Output over judgment.

A 2025 review in Frontiers in Big Data categorized algorithmic bias into four families: historical and representational, selection and measurement, algorithmic and optimization, and feedback and emergent. Every category traces back to human decisions. Historical bias reflects the values embedded in training data. Selection bias reflects what organizations choose to measure. Optimization bias reflects the objectives humans defined. And feedback bias reflects the reinforcing loops between human behavior and machine output.

The Management Science research published in 2025 found something both reassuring and deeply uncomfortable: even fairness-unaware machine learning algorithms can reduce bias in human decisions. If an algorithm that was never designed to be fair produces less biased outcomes than a human process, what does that tell us about the human process? It tells us that the judgment we trusted was never as objective as we believed. We defined our own version of the truth and accepted subjectivity as objectivity.

When AI systems replicate these individual and organizational patterns at scale, they feel cold, rigid, or wrong. But that discomfort we feel deeply isn’t evidence of any algorithmic failure. It’s evidence of a misalignment between espoused values and lived human behavior. The real human behavior we often seek to overlook.

What then unsettles people isn’t that AI lacks humanity. We really don’t want it to be that much like us. It’s that it mirrors what we want to hide, what we don’t want to recognize, or the reality we seek to dismiss.

What the Mirror Shows Organizations

When organizations and individuals look honestly and objectively at algorithmic outputs, three things often become visible.

AI Reveals What Gets Rewarded

Not what’s written in mission statements, but what actually advances careers, earns recognition, and avoids friction. If an algorithm prioritizes volume over quality or speed over reflection, it’s because the system learned those preferences from human behavior. Consider how we think and construct the prompts we input, what language we use, how that language can be evaluated, and the inference AI makes in what we are really seeking.

MIT Sloan Management Review found that in a recent survey, 26% of respondents reported getting meaningful personal value from AI while noting that their organizations derived little or no value at all. Of course, we are in the somewhat early stages of organizational adoption, but……that gap between individual benefit and organizational return isn’t really a technology failure. It takes the shape of a mirror that reflects what organizations and their leaders actually reward versus what they say they reward. Interesting, isn’t it?

AI Exposes Where Judgment Was Already Thin

Many roles assumed to require deep expertise are, in practice, governed by heuristics, shortcuts, and unspoken rules. AI doesn’t eliminate judgment in these cases. It reveals how thin it already was.

The California Management Review published a 2025 study demonstrating that when AI was deliberately debiased, it outperformed human decision-making in board candidate selection by enabling a shift from fast unconscious processing to slow conscious evaluation. This finding should be deeply uncomfortable for anyone who believes human judgment is inherently superior. It isn’t. It’s often faster, more intuitive, and socially acceptable, but those are not the same things as better.

I wrote about this in the newsletter issue on professional identity crisis, When Your Expertise Becomes Obsolete. The paradox remains: the employees organizations rely on most—the go-to problem solvers, the institutional knowledge keepers—often become the people most psychologically threatened by change. Not because they oppose progress, but because systematic change threatens the very expertise that defines their professional identity. AI presents the mirror to expose the reality.

AI Surfaces Inconsistency

Humans routinely make exceptions, override rules, manipulate situations, and rationalize deviations. We are always seeking to sway others to our values and ways of thinking, how we have interpreted information, the value we assign to it, and more.

When AI applies the same logic consistently, those inconsistencies become visible, like right in our face visible and we become incredibly uncomfortable facing that reality. Harvard Business Review reported in January 2026 that bias in AI is not just baked into training data; it is shaped by the broader ecosystem of human-AI interaction. The way people engage with AI—through their thinking, questions, interpretations, and decisions—significantly shapes how these systems behave. Organizations don’t just train algorithms on their data. They train them in their culture. And culture includes every exception, every override, every manipulation, and every unspoken compromise.

The issue isn’t that AI lacks judgment. It’s that it forces organizations and individuals to confront how selectively they’ve been using theirs.

Why Everyone Is Resisting the Reflection

Resistance to AI is often framed as caution, ethics, or risk management. Sometimes those concerns are legitimate. We know hallucinations occur, we see deep-fakes and how they appear so realistic, and we question what our prompts actually result in and wonder if AI is in error or we are.

Often, however, they mask something else: identity threat, a topic I deeply covered in the first episode of the Human Factor Podcast season 2. For many leaders and experts, authority has long rested on opaque judgment—the ability to make respected and accepted decisions others can’t fully explain or replicate. AI challenges the mystique that leaders and experts rely upon. When an algorithm produces similar or better outcomes using transparent logic, it raises an unsettling question: What, exactly, has expertise been hiding or protecting?

A foundational study in Electronic Markets identified three central predictors of AI identity threat in the workplace: changes to work, loss of status position, and what the researchers call AI identity—the degree to which professionals see AI as challenging who they are, not just what they do. A peer-reviewed 2025 study in MDPI Systems went further, identifying two distinct dimensions of AI anxiety: anticipatory anxiety, driven by fears of future disruption, and annihilation anxiety, reflecting existential concerns about human identity and autonomy. The language itself—annihilation anxiety—captures something that needs to be taken seriously. This is not a resistance born of stubbornness. This is a resistance born of an existential threat to professional selfhood.

In the Invisible Friction issue, I explored how strategies falter because people resist not out of obstinacy but because they fear loss. They disengage not because they are lazy but because they feel disconnected from meaning. My Human Factor Method Phase Four, Activation, recognizes that behavior changes only when people feel seen, when they can connect their current and new personal identity to the collective journey, and where psychological safety exists. People resist AI not because they don’t understand the technology. They resist because the technology threatens the story they tell themselves about who they are.

The Real Risk Isn’t AI Error—It’s Human Denial

The most dangerous response we can have to AI isn’t blind adoption or outright rejection. It’s denial. Blaming the tool for revealing uncomfortable truths. Demanding human override without examining the reflected human bias. Rejecting outputs instead of interrogating underlying assumptions.

The scale of this denial is staggering. MIT’s 2025 study on corporate AI found that so far in this rapidly developing early stage, 95% of corporate AI projects fail to create measurable value. Meanwhile, 91% of CIOs cite culture as the primary impediment to AI adoption, versus only 9% citing technology. In other words, leaders largely agree that the technology works. The human systems do not, or more precisely, the human systems within organizations don’t.

AI offers a rare chance for organizational self-awareness. It exposes patterns humans can’t easily see or want to see because they’re embedded in culture, habit, and identity. Ignoring that reflection doesn’t preserve humanity. It preserves the illusion-based reality we seek to live in.

The Feedback Loop We Built but Don’t Acknowledge

AI bias is not linear. It is recursive.

Organizations train AI on their historical decisions. AI reflects those patterns back. Humans absorb those reflections and act on them, often unconsciously. And the cycle repeats, each iteration reinforcing what came before.

Meanwhile, transparency is declining. As organizations become more dependent on AI systems, they understand less; the biases reflected back become harder to detect, harder to attribute, and harder to correct.

This is why the human factor is not a side note in the AI conversation. It is the conversation. The McKinsey Global Survey on AI found that the single biggest factor in achieving measurable returns from AI is the redesign of workflows—a fundamentally human and cultural undertaking. The value of AI comes from rewiring how organizations run. That is not a technology project. That is a transformation project. And transformation, as I have argued consistently, lives or dies in the human system.

A Different Leadership Question

Most AI conversations focus on control. How do we govern it? How do we constrain it? How do we limit risk? Those are necessary questions, but they are incomplete. A more uncomfortable, and ultimately more useful, question is this: What is AI revealing about who we are and how we already operate?

I wrote about this challenge of revelation in The Mental Overload of Modern Leadership: leaders today are already operating at the limits of their cognitive architecture, processing across multiple complex systems simultaneously, while their brains evolved for sequential processing. Adding AI to this environment without addressing the fundamental mismatch between cognitive capacity and role demands doesn’t solve the overload problem. It amplifies it. The mirror reflects faster than leaders can process what they are seeing.

Until leaders are willing to ask what AI is revealing about their organizations, the organizational culture, and the reality of what their organization is capable of, AI will remain a threat, a revealer of the truth, rather than a teacher.

Learning to Look

AI is not forcing organizations to change who they are. It is forcing them to see who they’ve been.

For leaders and really any individual willing to look honestly, that reflection can be transformative. For those who refuse, AI will feel like an external threat—something to resist, regulate, or blame.

The technology isn’t the mirror. It’s the light.

And once something is visible, it can’t be unseen.

The question isn’t whether AI belongs in your organization.

It’s whether you’re prepared to see what it reflects back and reveals.

Connect with Us

What leadership challenges are shaping your decisions right now? We’d love to hear your insights. Share your experiences with us on our Substack or join the conversation on our LinkedIn. For more insights on navigating organizational complexity, explore our archive of “Ideas and Innovations” newsletters or pick up a copy of The Truth About Transformation: Leading in the Age of AI, Uncertainty and Human Complexity.

Go Deeper: Subscribe to the Human Factor Podcast where we explore the psychology of organizational change, from resistance and identity to the frameworks and strategies that help leaders navigate transformation.

If you haven’t yet subscribed to the Human Factor Podcast, find it on your favorite podcast platform. Season 1 covered frameworks and strategies to understand and lead through change and transformation, and now season 2 is here to help you more deeply.

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