With Mathilde Fontez, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon, we speak today of our almost uncontrolled tendency, to ask Google for answers as soon as we seek information, to “Google” everything before even thinking.
franceinfo: Would this trend lead us to be more pretentious, to think that we know everything, Mathilde?
Mathilde Fontez: Yes. We tend to do it as soon as we have our phone handy. And we often have our phone handy: when we look for the title of a film, the name of an actor, a date, we “google” before even thinking. And that is not without impact.
This is shown by a rather staggering study. It was conducted by a researcher in cognitive science, from the University of Austin, in the United States. In fact, by dint of “Googling”, our perception of our thoughts becomes confused. We think that it is in us that we found the information, and not on the Internet.
Looks like we knew it!
It’s exactly that. The researcher carried out a dozen different experiments, with people who had access, or not, to Google to answer questionnaires; others with a slow Google; others with Wikipedia.
And what he observes is that the speed of Google, the fact that the search engine does not necessarily give context for the information – it simply gives the answer – all that is very much like the path that we naturally do with our memory to look for information. The search engine has also been designed in its design for that, to resemble our minds. In short, “googling” short-circuits our search process in our memory, and it replaces it.
Consequence: we tend to confuse Google and our memory. And consequence of this consequence: we become very very confident in our knowledge. In the experiments, those who had used Google overrated their ability to answer the following questions. They overestimated their knowledge, and their memory. They even overestimated their intelligence, their ability to reason.
And it doesn’t do it for Wikipedia?
No, because there, the context around the info reminds our brain that we did a search on the Internet. It’s more like picking up a book, or asking someone.
And it doesn’t either when Google takes 25 seconds to give us the answer. There, we have time to realize that we don’t know, that we have searched, and that we have found the answer on the Internet. It’s quite dizzying, Google has become a real brain prosthesis. Or forget it!