Cognitive Attrition

Sabotage
Cognitive attrition is a deliberate strategy of overwhelming target populations with high-volume, contradictory information to exhaust their critical thinking capacity and disengage them from public discourse, benefiting authoritarian actors by undermining the informed citizenry that democracies require.
Author
Affiliation

E. Rosalie Li

Information Epidemiology Lab

Published

February 17, 2026

Sabotage

Cognitive attrition is a deliberate strategy of overwhelming target populations with high-volume, contradictory information to exhaust their critical thinking capacity and disengage them from public discourse, benefiting authoritarian actors by undermining the informed citizenry that democracies require.

FIMI Taxonomy by Information Epidemiology Lab.

Citation

BibTeX citation:
@article{li2026,
  author = {Li, E. Rosalie},
  title = {Cognitive {Attrition}},
  date = {2026-02-17},
  url = {https://fimi.infoepi.org/mechanisms/cognitive-attrition.html},
  langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Li, E. Rosalie. 2026. “Cognitive Attrition,” February. https://fimi.infoepi.org/mechanisms/cognitive-attrition.html.