Google Dependence: An Unintended Consequence
April 23, 2015
I read “Study: Googling Gives You an Inflated Sense of Your Own Intelligence.” Let’s assume that the data are statistically significant and good enough to earn the researchers a high mark in Psych 200.
The article reports that Yale University researchers learned that:
The people who had used search engines to look up the answers in the first part of the experiment rated their abilities higher than the people who were given text. In other words, the act of searching the internet made people believe they knew more about everything.
The write up points out:
“If you don’t know the answer to a question, it’s very apparent to you that you don’t know, and it takes time and effort to find the answer,” Matthew Fischer, one of the researchers, told the American Psychological Association. “With the internet, the lines become blurry between what you know and what you think you know.”
I mentioned to a former Gartner consultant that the issue of “you don’t know what you don’t know” is one that leads to some interesting decisions. These range from licensing an enterprise search system and then discovering that users cannot find their documents to investing tens of thousands in a Web site redesign only to discover that Google’s crawler down checks the site because it is not mobile friendly.
You may have your own “you don’t know what you don’t know moment.” I suppose one could search Google and just accept what the ad oracle delivers. On the other hand, one can just guess. I am not sure how many knowledge workers want to do the old fashioned, “learn the hard way” type work. Maybe it is better to ask a Windows Phone? That works really well.
Stephen E Arnold, April 23, 2015
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