Searching for information has become instant and effortless-just go to your nearest device, ask Siri or click a few keys. But are we better informed than we were before Google became a verb?
A new paper published in Nature hints that we're not. When researchers exposed volunteers to a mix of fake and real news stories, they found people became more prone to being fooled by fake stories after being asked to do an internet search.
That does not negate the value of search engines, but as with all technology, there can be unintended consequences. Searches on misleading stories often pull people into a spiral of even more bad information.
The Nature paper included results of several studies. In some, people were asked to evaluate news stories that had just broken in the last 48 hours. In one, they saw stories from recent months on covid, spanning scientific, political and economic angles. In some cases, people were randomly assigned to evaluate stories with or without doing their own search, and in others, the same people were asked to evaluate news items before and after a search.
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