In a study
published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface scientists have found
that whilst mass connectivity through social media and the internet makes us
look smarter it might be making us stupider.
Copying other
people has helped the human race become adaptable, letting us acquire
information from other people as well as by direct experience. In the internet
era, where we have access to a diversity of information, many pundits say
humankind will learn to make more informed decisions. Whereas others suggest
having so much information at our fingertips will limit our ability for
concentration, contemplation and reflection. Seeking to find out if social
networks make us smarter a team of scientists investigated if networks help us imitate
analytical thought processes from our peers.
To carry out their
experiment the researchers tested university students with a series of
brain-straining questions. 100 volunteers were separated into 5 social networks
each with 20 individuals. Connections between the people in the networks were
assigned randomly by a computer to fit 5 different network patterns. At one
extreme all the people in the network were connected directly to all the
others, and at the other extreme there were no connections at all. To test how
these networks helped the people in them to learn, the scientists quizzed the
volunteers with a 'cognitive reflection test', a series of questions which rely
on analytical reasoning to overcome incorrect intuition.
To see if the
social networks helped the people in them to improve their answers the
volunteers were asked each of the questions 5 times. The first time the
volunteers had to figure it out on their own, the next 5 times they were
allowed to copy the answer from their neighbors in the network. The researchers
found that in well-connected networks volunteers copy-cats got better at giving
the right answer the more times they were asked and the more opportunities they
had to steal their neighbors’ answers. This result showed that when the
students had lots of connections to peers they could recognize where they had
given a wrong answer and swap it for the right one, proving to the scientists
that well-connected networks can help us get the right answer because we can
copy from our peers.
The scientists
compared how well the volunteers faired in the three consecutive questions to
see if the volunteers were actually getting better at figuring out the problems
themselves or just at copying the right answers. They found that there was no
improvement from one question to the next; even when individuals had realised
in the first round of questions that finding the solutions required deeper
thought, in the next question they were back at square one. The scientists say
it's a surprising result because it's already been proven that analytical
reasoning can be primed very simply, by showing subjects a picture of Rodin's
Thinker for example, or using a challenging font to type up questions. The team
say the results show that whilst social networks helped the volunteers choose
better answers they didn't prime them to answer more logically themselves,
showing that 'social learning does not seem to help individuals bypass their
bias in favour of intuition but rather help society as a whole thrive despite
this bias'.
Whilst some
commentators say the internet is making us stupid and others say it's helping
us make more informed decisions the scientists behind this study say that they
might both be right. Being able to copy from other people in vast networks
means analytical responses rapidly spread, fulfilling their promise of improved
decision-making for well-connected people. 'On the other hand, the bias may
very well decrease the frequency of analytical reasoning by making it easy and
commonplace for people to reach analytical response without engaging analytical
processing' say the team, and this tendency to copy without thinking 'can
explain why increased connectivity may eventually make us stupid by making us
smarter first'.
Provided by The
Royal Society
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