Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

by John Brockman

  However, like almost everyone else, I’ve wasted huge amounts of time wandering around the Internet. As part of my profession, I think a lot about the behavior of primates, including humans, and the behavior manifest in the Internet has subtly changed my thinking. Much has been made of the emergent properties of the Internet. The archetypal example, of course, is Wikipedia.

  A few years back, Nature commissioned a study showing that when it came to accuracy about hard-core scientific facts, Wikipedia was within hailing distance of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Immensely cool—in just a few years, a self-correcting, bottom-up system of quality, fundamentally independent of authorities-from-on-high, is breathing down the neck of the Mother of all sources of knowledge. The proverbial wisdom of crowds. It strikes me that there may be a very interesting consequence of this. When you have generations growing up with bottom-up emergence as routine, when wisdom-of-the-crowd phenomena tell you more accurately what movies you’ll like than can some professional movie critic, people are more likely to realize that life, too, can have emerged, in all its adaptive complexity, without some omnipotent being with a game plan.

  As another plus, the Internet has made me think that the downtrodden have a slightly better chance of being heard—the efficacy of the crowd. A small example of that: the recent elections in which candidates ran Internet campaigns. Far more consequential, of course, is the ability of the people to vote online about who should win on American Idol. But what I’m beginning to think is possible is that someday an abused populace will rise up and, doing nothing more than sitting at their computers and hacking away, freeze a government and bring down a dictator. Forget a Velvet Revolution. What about an Online Revolution? Mind you, amid that optimism, it’s hard not to despair a bit at the idiocy of the crowd, as insane rumors careen about the Internet.

  However, what has most changed my thinking is the array of oddities online. By this, I don’t mean the fact that, as of this writing, 147 million people have watched “Charlie Bit My Finger—Again!” with another 20 million watching the various remixes. That’s small change. I mean the truly strange Websites. Like the ones for people with apotemnophilia, a psychiatric disease whose victims wish to lose a limb.

  There’s someone who sold online, for $263, a piece of gum that Britney Spears had spit out. A Website for people who like to chew on ice cubes. Websites (yes, plural) for people who are aroused by pictures of large stuffed animals “having sex,” and one for people who have been cured of that particular taste by Jesus. An online museum of barf bags from airlines from around the world. A site for people who like to buy garden gnomes and stab them in the head with sharp things, and then post pictures of it. And on and on. Weirdness of the crowd.

  As a result of wasting my time over the years surfing the Internet, I’ve come to better understand how people have a terrible craving to find others like themselves, and the more unconventional the person, the greater the need. I’ve realized that there can be unforeseen consequences in a material world crammed with the likes of barf bags and garden gnomes. And most of all, the existence of these worlds has led me to appreciate more deeply the staggering variety and richness of the internal lives of humans. So, maybe not such a waste of time.

  The Synchronization of Minds

  Jamshed Bharucha

  Professor of psychology, provost, senior vice president, Tufts University

  Synchronization of thought and behavior promotes group cohesion—for better or worse. People love to share experiences and emotions. We delight in coordinated activity. We feel the pull of conformity. And we feed off each other. Synchronization creates a sense of group agency, in which the group is greater than the sum of the people in it.

  The Internet sparks synchronization across vast populations. Never before in history have people been able to relate to each other on this scale. The discovery of new tools has always changed the way we think. We are social beings, and the Internet is the most powerful social tool with which the human brain has ever worked.

  Through the Internet, people with common backgrounds, interests, or problems can find one another, creating new groups with new identities in unprecedented ways. Amorphous groups can become energized, as people who had gone their separate ways reconnect. As with all technologies, this powerful social tool can be used constructively or destructively. Either way, it certainly has changed the way we think about ourselves.

  People yearn to be part of a group. Most feel part of multiple groups. Group identity is as important to us as anything else and provides the glue that binds us together. Group affiliation is affirming, exhilarating, motivating. As the Internet develops the bandwidth to communicate seamlessly in real time—with more of the nuance of in-person communication—its binding power will become ever more compelling.

  The downside of synchronization on this scale is the risk of herding behavior or virtual mobs. However, the transparency and anonymity of the Internet allows contrary feelings to be expressed, which can balance out the narrowing effect of groupthink.

  In the early days of the Internet, few predicted it would plug into our social instincts as it has. Not only has the binding force of the Internet changed the way we think about ourselves and the world, it also has possibly enabled an emergent form of cognition—one that occurs when individual minds are intricately synchronized.

  My Judgment Enhancer

  Geoffrey Miller

  Evolutionary psychologist, University of New Mexico; author, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

  The Internet changes every aspect of thinking for the often-online human: perception, categorization, attention, memory, spatial navigation, language, imagination, creativity, problem solving, Theory of Mind, judgment, and decision making. These are the key research areas in cognitive psychology and constitute most of what the human brain does. The Websites of BBC News and the Economist extend my perception, becoming my sixth sense for world events. Gmail structures my attention through my responses to incoming messages: delete, respond, or star for response later? Wikipedia is my extended memory. An online calendar changes how I plan my life. Google Maps changes how I navigate through my city and world. Facebook expands my Theory of Mind—allowing me to better understand the beliefs and desires of others.

  But for me, the most revolutionary change is in my judgment and decision making—the ways I evaluate and choose among good or bad options. I’ve learned that I can offload much of my judgment onto the large samples of peer ratings available on the Internet. These, in aggregate, are almost always more accurate than my individual judgment. To decide which Blu-ray DVDs to put in my Netflix queue, I look at the average movie ratings on Netflix, IMDb, and Metacritic. These reflect successively higher levels of expertise among the raters—movie renters on Netflix, film enthusiasts on IMDb, and film critics on Metacritic. Any film with high ratings across all three sites is almost always exciting, beautiful, and thoughtful.

  My fallible, quirky, moody judgments are hugely enhanced by checking average peer ratings: book and music ratings on Amazon, used car ratings on Edmunds.com, foreign hotel ratings on TripAdvisor, and citations to scientific papers on Google Scholar. We can finally harness the law of large numbers to improve our decision making: the larger the sample of peer ratings, the more accurate the average. As ratings accumulate, margins of error shrink, confidence intervals get tighter, and estimates improve. Ordinary consumers have access to better product rating data than market researchers could hope to collect.

  Online peer ratings empower us to be evidence-based about almost all our decisions. For most goods and services—and, indeed, most domains of life—they offer a kind of informal meta-analysis, an aggregation of data across all the analyses already performed by like-minded consumers. Judgment becomes socially distributed and statistical rather than individual and anecdotal.

  Rational-choice economists might argue that sales figures are a better indication than online ratings of real consumer preferences, insofar as people v
ote with their dollars to reveal their preferences. This ignores the problem of buyer’s remorse: Consumers buy many things that they find disappointing. Their postpurchase product ratings mean much more than their prepurchase judgments. Consumer Reports.org data on car owner satisfaction (“Would you buy your car again?”) are much more informative than sales figures for new cars. Metacritic ratings of the Twilight movies are more informative about quality than first-weekend box office sales. Informed peer ratings are much more useful guides to sensible consumer choices than popularity counts, sales volumes, market share, or brand salience.

  You might think that postpurchase ratings would be biased by rationalization (“I bought product X, so it must be good or I’d look like a fool”). No doubt that happens when we talk with friends and neighbors, but the anonymity of most online ratings reduces the embarrassment effect of admitting one’s poor judgments and wrong decisions.

  Of course, peer ratings of any product can, like votes in an election, be biased by stupidity, ignorance, fashion cycles, mob effects, lobbying, marketing, and vested interests. The average online consumer’s IQ is only a little above 100 now, and average education is just a couple of years of college. Runaway popularity can be mistaken for lasting quality. Clever ads, celebrity endorsements, and brand reputations can bias the judgment of even the most independent-minded consumers. Rating sites can be gamed and manipulated by retailers. Nonetheless, online peer ratings remain more useful than any other consumer empowerment movement in the last century.

  To use peer ratings effectively, we have to let go of our intellectual and aesthetic pretensions. We have to recognize that some of our consumer judgments served mainly as conspicuous displays of our intelligence, openness, taste, or wealth and are not really the most effective way to choose the best option. We have to learn some humility. My best recent movie viewing experiences have all come from valuing the Metacritic ratings over my own assumptions, prejudices, and prejudgments. In the process, I’ve acquired a newfound respect for the collective wisdom of our species. This recognition that my own thinking is not so different from, or better than, everyone else’s is one of the Internet’s great moral lessons. Online peer ratings reinforce egalitarianism, mutual respect, and social capital. Against the hucksterism of marketing and lobbying, they knit humanity together into collective decision-making systems of formidable power and intelligence.

  Speed Plus Mobs

  Alan Alda

  Actor, writer, director; host of The Human Spark, on PBS

  Telephones make me anxious for some reason—so ever since I’ve been able to communicate over the Web I’ve seldom gone near the phone. But something strange has happened. At least once a day I have to stop and think about whether what I’ve just written can be misinterpreted. In e-mail, there’s no instant modulation of the voice that can correct a wrong tone, as there is on the phone, and even though I avoid irony when e-mailing anyone who’s not a professional comedian or amateur curmudgeon, I sometimes have to send a second note to un-miff someone. This can be a problem with any written communication, of course, but e-mail, Web postings, and texting all tempt us with speed. And that speed can cost us clarity. This is not so good, because increasingly we communicate quickly, without that modulating voice. I’m even one of those people who will e-mail someone across the room.

  In addition, the Internet has connected so many millions of us into anonymous online mobs that the impression that something is true can be created simply by the sheer number of people who repeat it. (In the absence of other information, a crowded restaurant will often get more diners than an empty one, not always because of the quality of the food.)

  Speed plus mobs. A scary combination. Together, will they seriously reduce the accuracy of information and our thoughtfulness in using it?

  Somehow, we need what taking our time used to give us: thinking before we talk and questioning before we believe.

  I wonder—is there an algorithm perking somewhere in someone’s head right now that can act as a check against this growing hastiness and mobbiness? I hope so. If not, I may have to start answering the phone again.

  Repetition, Availability, and Truth

  Daniel Haun

  Director, the Research Group for Comparative Cognitive Anthropology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

  I was born in 1977—or 15 B.I., if you like; that is, if you take the 1992 version of the Internet to be the real thing. Anyway, I don’t really remember being without it. When I first looked up, emerging out of the dark and quickly forgotten days of a sinister puberty, it was already there. Waiting for me. So it seems to me that it hasn’t changed the way I think—not in a before-and-after fashion, anyway. But even if you are reading these lines through graying and uncontrollably long eyebrows, let me reassure you that it hasn’t changed the way you think, either. Of course, it has changed the content of your thinking—not just through the formidable availability of information you seek but, most important, through the information you don’t. From what little I understand about human thought, though, I don’t think the Internet has changed the way you think. Its architecture has not changed yours.

  Let me try to give you an example of the way people think. The way you think. I have already told you three times that the Internet hasn’t changed the way you think (four and counting), and each time you read it, the statement becomes more believable to you. For more than sixty years, psychologists have been reporting the human tendency to mistake repetition for truth. This is called the illusion-of-truth effect. You believe to be true what you hear often. The same applies to whatever comes to mind first or most easily.

  People, including you, believe the examples they can think of right away to be most representative and therefore indicative of the truth. This is called the availability heuristic. Let me give you a famous example. In English, what is the relative proportion of words that start with the letter K versus words that have the letter K in third position? The reason most people believe the former to be more common than the latter is that they can easily remember a lot of words that start with a K but few that have a K in the third position. The truth in fact is that there are three times more words with K in third than in first position. Now, if you doubt that people really believe this (maybe because you don’t), you have just proved my point. Availability creates the illusion of truth. Repetition creates the illusion of truth. I would repeat that, but you get my point.

  Let’s reconsider the Internet. How do you find the truth on the Internet? You use a search engine. Search engines evidently have very complicated ways to determine which pages will be most relevant to your personal quest for the truth. But in a nutshell, a page’s relevance is determined by how many other relevant pages link to it. Repetition, not truth. Your search engine will then present a set of ranked pages to you, determining availability. Repetition determines availability, and both together create the illusion of truth. Hence, the Internet does just what you would do. It isn’t changing the structure of your thinking, because it resembles it. It isn’t changing the structure of your thinking, because it resembles it.

  The Armed Truce

  Irene M. Pepperberg

  Research associate and lecturer, Harvard University; adjunct associate professor, Department of Psychology, Brandeis; author, Alex and Me

  The Internet hasn’t changed the way I think. I still use the same scientific training that was drummed into me as an undergraduate and graduate student in theoretical chemistry, even when it comes to evaluating aspects of my daily life: Based on a certain preliminary amount of information, I develop a hypothesis and try to refine it so that it differs from any competing equally plausible hypotheses; I test the hypothesis; if it is proved true, I rest my case within the limits of that hypothesis, aware that I may have solved only one piece of a puzzle; if it is proved false, I revise and repeat the procedure.

  Rather, what has changed, and is still changing, is my relationship with the Internet—from unabashed inf
atuation to disillusionment to a kind of armed truce. And no, I’m not sidestepping the question, because until the Internet actually rewires my brain, it won’t change my processing abilities. Of course, such rewiring may be in the offing, and quite possibly sooner than we expect, but that’s not yet the case.

  So, my changing, love-hate relationship with the Internet:

  First came the honeymoon phase—believing that nothing in the world could ever be as wondrous, and appreciating the incredible richness and simplicity the Internet brought into my life. No longer did I have to trudge through winter’s snow or summer’s heat to a library at the other end of campus—or even come to campus—to acquire information or connect with friends and colleagues all over the world.

  Did I need to set up a symposium for an international congress? Just a few e-mails, and all was complete. Did I need an obscure reference or that last bit of data for the next day’s PowerPoint presentation while in an airport lounge, whether in Berlin or Beijing, Sydney or Salzburg? Ditto. Did I need a colleague’s input on a tricky problem, or to provide the same service myself ? Ditto. Even when it came to needing to rapidly research and send a gift because I forgot a birthday or anniversary—ditto. A close friend moves to Australia? No problem staying in touch anymore. But here the only things that changed were the various limitations on the types of information accessible to me within certain logistical boundaries.

  Next came the disenchantment phase—the realization that more and faster were not always better. My relationship with the Internet began to feel oppressive, overly demanding of my time and energy. Just because I can be available and can work 24/7/365, must I? The time saved and the efficiencies achieved began to backfire. I no longer had the luxury of recharging my brain by observing nature during that walk to the library, or by reading a novel in that airport lounge.