Many of us make jokes about how we've outsourced part of our brain to electronic devices. But based on a new paper by the University of Texas at Austin's Adrian Ward, this is just a variation on something that has been happening throughout human history. No person could ever learn everything they need to know. But that's OK, according to Ward: "No one person needs to know everything—they simply need to know who knows it."
Over time, we've developed alternatives to finding the person who has the information we need, relying on things like books and other publications. The Internet simply provides electronic equivalents, right?
Not entirely, according to Ward's latest results. Based on data he generated, it seems that search engines now return information so quickly and seamlessly that we tend to think we remembered information that we actually looked up. And that may be giving us unjustified confidence in our ability to pull facts out of our brain.
The speed of search
Ward's hypothesis is based on the idea that we probably categorize the recall process based on how easy it is. Wading through all the extraneous information in a book to find the single nugget we require can be arduous, even when the book is right at hand. While it can sometimes be difficult to latch onto a fact in our memory, it's generally much more convenient. For the easy-to-recall items—like the lyrics to annoying pop songs from our high school years—it's often instantaneous.
Of the two, Ward argues, Internet searches are more like remembering something, in that they're generally quick, don't have a lot of extraneous information, and are displayed via interfaces that are easy to process. "Thinking with Google," he writes, "which delivers information as unobtrusively as possible, may simply feel more like thinking alone."
If that's the case, performing searches to get information may feel a lot more like successfully pulling something out of our memory. And that could be misleading, since successful searches would give us the sense that our memory is more expansive than it actually is.
To test this hypothesis, Ward created a variety of information-recall questions. He then had people answer them, either by memory or by using Google. Layered on top of this simple scheme were variations on the recall challenge that helped identify how people viewed a successful Internet search.
Our sense of self includes Google
The most basic experiment involved having people answer 10 questions using either their memory or an Internet search and then take a cognitive self-esteem test, which measures how the subjects felt about their mental capacity. Those who were able to use Google got more questions right. But they came away with an enhanced sense of their own abilities. They were also more likely than those who relied on memory to say that they would do well on a future test in which they couldn't use the Internet.
From there, Ward's experiments branched out. In this case, both groups were given the correct answers to the questions they faced, allowing them to judge their actual performance. They were then asked about their confidence in a future test, and again, Google users were more confident. In this instance, however, subjects were actually given that future test, at which point it became clear that the Google-inflated confidence was misplaced, since the people who were deprived of the Internet in the second round performed just as poorly as everyone else.
In another test, the people who relied on memory were told that they got eight of 10 answers right, regardless of their actual performance. The ones who believed this score came away with an inflated sense of confidence that was roughly equal in magnitude to the people who used Google. Yet another test showed that this self-confidence evaporated if the Google users were asked to write down any answers they could pull out of memory before using Google. In other words, if they were forced to reckon with their memory's limitations before using the search engine, the subjects didn't end up with an exaggerated sense of their performance.
Ward also tested the importance of the immediacy of Google's results in producing the illusion that it was the equivalent to memory. This was done by simply delaying search results by 25 seconds, which reduced the confidence but did not eliminate it. These results suggest that a search's quick returns influenced whether subjects confused it with memory. Similarly, people who were asked very difficult questions tended to not gain self-confidence from using Internet searches but did get a boost in their expectation of future performance.
Finally, the researchers compared Google users to people who were provided with a Wikipedia page that contained the answer. Here, they found that Wikipedia users were more likely to correctly recall where they got their information, while Google users typically misremembered and thought they remembered the fact themselves.
Whose brain is it, anyway?
While some of the more specific conclusions may be a bit tenuous, the overall trends are pretty robust. Each of the later experiments tended to include groups that repeated the procedure involved in the first experiment, and Ward combined all of this data to produce an internal meta-analysis that included over 1,900 subjects. The tendency for Google users to behave as if they had demonstrated superior recall was very consistent.
So, what do we make of this behavior? Ward offers a simple and non-threatening explanation: "If Google answers questions before users can finish searching their own memories, people may never realize that the internal search would have turned up empty."
But the consequences could be a bit more problematic, given that the inability to tell the difference gives people an unrealistic sense of their mental prowess. In that sense, there does seem to be some overlap with the Dunning-Kruger effect, since people end up with an inflated view of their own abilities and (since search engines are almost always available) lack the ability to understand their limitations. Consequences could appear as soon as someone ends up somewhere with bad cell service.
Beyond that, there are implications for sectors like education. There's a perpetual debate about how much students should be allowed to look up versus what they should be compelled to memorize so that ready knowledge of basic facts can free up mental space for more sophisticated thinking. If the students might be less able to tell the difference between the two than we thought, that fact should probably be taken into account.
PNAS, 2021. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2105061118 (About DOIs).
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