Kateclodfelter's List: Misinformation Debate

• 00 volunteers were separated into 5 social networks each with 20 individuals.
• At one extreme all the people in the network were connected directly to all the others, and at the other extreme there were no connections at all. To test how these networks helped the people in them to learn, the scientists quizzed the volunteers with a 'cognitive reflection test', a series of questions which rely on analytical reasoning to overcome incorrect intuition.
• This result showed that when the students had lots of connections to peers they could recognise where they had given a wrong answer and swap it for the right one, proving to the scientists that well-connected networks can help us get the right answer because we can copy from our peers.
• They found that there was no improvement from one question to the next; even when individuals had realised in the first round of questions that finding the solutions required deeper thought, in the next question they were back at square one.
• The team say the results show that whilst social networks helped the volunteers choose better answers they didn't prime them to answer more logically themselves, showing that 'social learning does not seem to help individuals bypass their bias in favour of intuition but rather help society as a whole thrive despite this bias'.
• the bias may very well decrease the frequency of analytical reasoning by making it easy and commonplace for people to reach analytical response without engaging analytical processing'
• his tendency to copy without thinking 'can explain why increased connectivity may eventually make us stupid by making us smarter first'.

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• Social networking probably isn’t making you smarter. In fact, it could be making you dumber by supplying answers and insights without requiring any actual thinking, so that your analytic powers begin to waste away like an unused muscle.
• “increased connectivity may eventually make us stupid by making us smarter first.”

• pupils are too distracted by sites such as Facebook and Twitter to bother to read a book.

  As a result, thousands are poor spellers and have little understanding of grammar.
• Excessive use of such sites means youngsters’ spelling and grammar have deteriorated
• rely on computer spellcheckers to correct their mistakes.
• It appears to confirm that the massive rise in social media use among the young is having a major impact on writing skills
• Bosses regularly complain about the poor literacy standards among school leavers, whose written English in applications forms and CVs can be shocking.
• Others sign their letters with several kisses, showing an inappropriate level of friendliness with a potential boss who they have never met.
• helping her students to learn good spelling and grammar involves a ‘fight’ with social media.
• a reliance on spell checks, has resulted in a decline in old-fashioned grammar and spelling
• England is the only developed country producing children who are worse at reading and maths than their grandparents, according to a recent report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
• Young people don’t have the literacy and numeracy skills to do the job properly.

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• Researchers believe speed, volume and ease with which information is shared through social networking sites may be making it more difficult for us to think analytically.
• The warning comes from Dr Iyad Rahwan, an honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh
• Dr Rahwan began by asking a group of 20 people three trick questions over and over again.

• For example they were told that and bat and ball cost £1.10 in total and that the bat cost £1 more than the ball, and then they were asked to work out how much the ball costs.

  The intuitive answer is 10p but the correct answer is actually 5p.

  Despite being repeatedly asked the  questions, people tended to stick with their original answers and only  got them correct around a quarter of the time.
• Dr Rahwan then gave the same questions to a second group of people.  They first answered the questions alone but then were put in groups and able to see each other’s responses.

• This surprised Dr Rahwan, who said it suggests that the volunteers were copying the answers without putting any real thought into what they were doing.
• there is a danger that the rise of information-sharing websites such as Twitter and Facebook will make us rely more and more on the opinion of others.
• This could erode our ability to think critically and make us lazy because we assume that there will always be someone else who knows the answer.
• while we may seem smarter because we have lots of information at our fingertips, any boost to intelligence is purely superficial

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• LITERACY standards in the UK are falling thanks to the rise of social media, according to a survey of headteachers.

• 70% of headteachers said Facebook and Twitter are bad for literacy. However, 73% said there is a place for IT in the classroom as a teaching aid, but only if used appropriately.