‘Smartphone Search Engine Use Leads To Lazy Thinking’

Dr Nathaniel Barr, postdoctoral fellow at the Reasoning and Decision Making Lab at University of Waterloo, Canada, recently co-led a study on smartphones, finding that less intelligent people search for information on smartphones more. The smarter you are—the less you use your smartphone. Here are excerpts of an email interview.

What does your study find cellphones can do to cognitive ability? If smartphone are getting younger, does this mean a user never lives up to potential?

Our research shows that people who are lazier in their thinking and less prone to reflection are more likely to use the search engine on their smartphone to find information. We don’t know yet whether the higher usage rates lead people to become lazier over time though. Since smartphones are so new to society, we simply have not had a chance to track the long term outcomes. More research is needed before these devices are so common place that we forget what life was like without them.

Should phone makers have warnings to indicate potential ill-effects?

More research is required to determine if reliance on smartphones will have ill-effects. As more scientific research emerges, society will need to decide how to address the positive and negative aspects of widespread adoption.

How can the phone discourage “effortful reasoning”? Could the lazy individual be insulated from his sloth by leaning on his smartphone for information?

It is important to consider the positive and negative aspects of the ability to search for information through our smartphones. On one hand, the ability to have instant access might lead to less use of memory, since people know they can retrieve the information from their phone rather than their mind. However, it also means that we have more access than ever before to diverse information, and we are less often left uninformed. What the optimal trade-off between internal thinking and external access of information via device remains to be seen.

Do you have any findings with respect social media and how they impact reasoning or other abilities? Anecdotally, social media seems to manipulate opinion.

In our work, we find a specific relation between smartphone search engine use and lazy thinking. No such relation existed between thinking styles and smartphone use for entertainment or social media purposes. Knowing that people rely on their smartphones rather than stored memories suggests we do need to be mindful of the type of information available online, especially in important areas like politics. That is, if we lazily access information online and do not think deeply about it, we are more likely to be influenced by information that may or may not be accurate. So, although we can’t say whether increased smartphone use is negative, we do advocate analytic and reflective thought about what we find online.

Is there an inherent tendency among some people to rely more on their smartphone?

We asked people how often they used their smartphone to search for information and related this amount to their scores on a variety of cognitive tests meant to assess how willing they were to think hard about problems. Since we find that people who more often rely on their smartphones for information are lazier thinkers, we guess that people are using their smartphones to access information that they would likely have already seen, but did not put in the effort to learn. It might have turned out that more analytic and eager thinkers could be using their smartphone to increase knowledge, but this is not what we found.

This web-exclusive Intervieww does not appear in print magazine.