Why Think When You Can Google Instead?
/Melissa Dahl writing for The Science of Us:
And so the question a team of psychologists at the University of Waterloo recently asked will likely be of interest: What does it say about our thinking skills when we habitually outsource problem-solving to our phones?
Their results, published online this week in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, suggest that people who admit to relying more heavily on their smartphones for information — for instance, Googling something they could’ve figured out by with a few minutes of thinking about it — are also less likely to be analytical thinkers, judging from their answers to problems designed to assess cognitive style and ability. The smartphone-dependent were likelier to be intuitive thinkers, which means that they relied on their gut instincts rather than careful analysis.