Alarm fatigue

A documented failure pattern, extensively studied in hospital patient monitoring, in which a high volume of low-value or false alerts causes trained personnel to habitually ignore, silence, or delay response to alerts across the board, including genuine emergencies, because sustained low-value signaling causes the human nervous system to disengage from the signal entirely.

The failure mode where operators, flooded with too many alerts, begin ignoring them, so the signal that matters is missed; the reason a runbook wires two or three sharp tripwires rather than a wall of alarms.

The documented pattern in which repeated urgent warnings, especially disproportionate to actual risk, cause an audience to progressively discount future warnings, including ones that later matter more.

The degradation of attention that occurs when a checkpoint fires too often, especially with false alarms, training the operator to dismiss it and miss the real signal.

The pattern in which a safeguard tuned to trigger too frequently on non-genuine conditions erodes the trust and attention of the people who work around it, eventually leading them to ignore, delay responding to, or deliberately disable the safeguard, defeating its purpose.