Do We Think Differently Than We Did Before?

When I first read Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker (2/14 & 26/11), essay “The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us,” I was put off by its cuteness. But he was asking an important question—What are the cognitive and personal effects of the Internet?—so I thought I’d read it again. On review, I realize it is, in its own Gopnikian way, a really fine discussion of the topic.

He approaches the question by reviewing six recent books, each representing one of three general answers to the question. Clay Shirkey’s Cognitive Surplus and John Tooby’s essay in John Brockman’s anthology Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? are discussed first. He calls their position “Never-Betterism.” The Never-Betters argue that the electronic age has given birth to a new expansion of our minds and means of transmitting information.

The Never Betters also have their proponents in Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind and Robert Logan’s The Sixth Language that draw their evidence primarily from psychological theory. Gopnik puts their argument this way. “Contraptions don’t change consciousness; contraptions are part of consciousness. We may not act better than we used to, but we sure think differently than we did before.”

Then there are the “Better-Nevers” who hold that the price we pay for the Internet isn’t worth what it costs. According to those in this camp, what it costs is a continual state of dissociation and fragmentation of thinking. Writers who hold this position include Nicholas Carr in his The Shallows, William Powers in Hamlet’s BlackBerry and most recently Sherry Turkle in Alone Together. Gopnik describes their view this way:

“The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private spaces for minds in ways that twenty second bursts of information don’t.”

Finally, there are the “Ever-Wasers” who argue really there’s nothing remarkable going on now, that there has always been some new method of presenting information that is exciting for some and ominous for others. Gopnik points to Ann Blair’s book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age to illustrate this position.

Blair suggests that information overload was already being felt before the invention of the Gutenberg press. People then were complaining about how it would ruin our minds and that all the new books being printed were disrupting a person’s ability to concentrate. And then, in a telling passage for anyone interested in the history of commonplace books, Gopnik cites Blair’s claim,

“During the later Middle Ages a staggering growth in the production of manuscripts facilitated by the use of paper accompanied a great expansion of readers outside the monastic and scholastic context.” Activities that seem quite twenty-first century she shows, begin when people cut and pasted from one manuscript to another; made aggregated news in compendiums…

In my view each of these three positions goes well beyond the data. Each makes blanket statements about the effects of whatever new age is being discussed. Each fails to take account of the wide variation among individuals in how they respond to any new technology.

As for the “Never-Betters,” speaking for myself, I find the Net a miracle, an amazing new research tool, and an infinite, easily accessible source of scholarly information. For me, turning on my computer in the morning is like opening the door to a vast library where I can spend all day. Of course, I wasn’t raised on the Internet, so I am not much help when it comes to predicting its future effects.

What the “Better-Nevers” claims lack is data, empirical evidence testing the claims they make concerning the way the Internet breaks down our capacity for reflective thought and concentrated deliberation. And they speak only of the purported changes to our mental apparatus, rather than its output. Are essays and books and scholarly papers any less intelligent today than they were in pre-Internet days? We need verifiable observations to answer questions like this, not a cascade of intuitions, speculations and hunches.

Concerning the “Ever-Wasers,” it is clear the historical record lends credence to their claims. However, to say the harmful effects of the Internet are not unlike what is always being said about a new technology (for example, the printing press or television) has no direct implications about the impact of the digital revolution. Perhaps the electronic revolution is a totally different beast that will transform the human brain in ways we have never seen before.

Gopnik concludes his essay with these wise words: “Thoughts are bigger than the things that deliver them. Our contraptions may shape our consciousness, but it is our consciousness that makes our credos.”

To Think or Not to Think

Like Malcolm Gladwell in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Jonah Lehrer on his blog The Frontal Cortex recently made a strong case for the value of unconscious thought. His argument was based on evidence derived from one experiment, in a European laboratory, under conditions of unknown generality. This kind of “cherry picking,” which Gladwell also employs, doesn’t do much for the fine art of science writing

Lehrer draws on a recent experiment by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis who asked three groups of subjects, a mix of experts and novices, to predict the outcome of soccer matches. The first group was asked to predict the outcome after thinking about it for two minutes. The second group was asked to make a decision immediately without thinking about it at all. The third group was asked to decide after being distracted by an unrelated memory task for two minutes.

The results indicated that experts, regardless of the group they were in, were very poor at predicting the outcome of the matches. So were the groups that thought about the matter for two minutes and those asked to make the decision immediately. In contrast, subjects who were distracted by the memory task for two minutes were “significantly” better than the other two groups. Lehrer concludes from this study that the practical implications are to “trust your gut.”

He then says the question is “what is the unconscious up to. What information is it processing during those two minutes of distraction?” I disagree. The question that seems most important to me is how representative of the decision-making process is this study, one that asked individuals to predict the outcome of soccer matches? How widely does it apply? Under what conditions doesn’t it hold? And let's not forget that the study was conducted under highly-reactive laboratory conditions with unknown relevance to natural situations.

We know that at times we benefit by trusting our gut reactions but at other times we don’t. Is there any way we can know when to trust them and when not to? A recent study by McMackin and Slovic sought to identify these conditions by comparing two decision-making tasks--one designed to favor an intuitive approach, the other a reasoned one.

On the intuitively biased task college students were asked to predict how a group of “experts” would rate the effectiveness of a set of consumer advertisements. The so-called expert ratings were obtained from group of psychology and marketing undergraduate students.

On the reasoned biased task, the students were asked to answer five questions requiring numerical estimates of matters of fact. For example, they were asked to estimate the area of the United States or the length of the Amazon River.

Two conditions of decision-making were compared with one another on each of these tasks—a group that was asked to decide immediately and a delayed responding group that was asked to respond after thinking about their reasons for a few minutes and then writing them down on a form provided by the experimenter.

The results indicated the immediately responding group was more accurate on the advertisement task than the group asked to think about their decision for a bit. In contrast, the immediately responding group (gut reactors) performed less accurately than the thinking group (also asked to provide reasons for their answers) on the more difficult task requiring numerical judgments.

Here then is one situation in which the characteristics of the task can critically affect the accuracy of a decision. Under some conditions, it may be more effective to respond without doing much thinking. In other conditions, a more deliberative, reasoned approach may be more effective.

I think it is essential not to ignore such limiting conditions when discussing the results of any scientific finding. All too often, we emphasize the outcome of a single study, without recognizing other studies that contradict, call it into question or suggest an alternative interpretation.

I fear this is one of the reasons we find ourselves so confused about the research we read or hear about in the popular media. No sooner do we learn that drinking wine is bad for our health, then the very next day we learn that it has no effect on our health and may, in fact, be essential for a long life, the very fountain of youth.