A person who handles their own affairs is now asked to confirm their identity many times each week. A login, a transfer, a new device, a routine purchase, the opening of a familiar account, the resumption of an ordinary process: each is preceded by some form of check. In the early years of these procedures, the principal paid attention. By now, in most cases, they do not.

Verification fatigue is the predictable result. A check that arrives on every routine action, and that has been answered correctly every time it has appeared, becomes a reflex. The principal sees the prompt, approves it, and continues with what they were doing. They are no longer reading the prompt with the attention the procedure was designed to assume.

This is not a failure of character; it is a feature of any system that asks for a check too often. The reflex emerges in any reasonably busy person. The procedure has, in effect, trained the principal to approve before considering.

The condition it creates is one in which a prompt that ought to invite scrutiny does not receive any. A login attempt from an unfamiliar place, an authorisation for an unfamiliar transaction, an approval for an unfamiliar device, can pass through the same reflex. The principal has approved before they have read.

The work here is rarely about reducing the number of prompts, which is largely outside the principal's control. It is about restoring attention at the prompts that actually matter, which can sometimes be done by reducing the routine ones, by escalating the rare ones in a way that interrupts the reflex, and by ensuring that the accounts where the consequences are greatest do not present prompts in the same form as the accounts where the consequences are small.