You can simply find anything you want to learn over internet today. Obama’s captivating style of presenting, Bill gates way of simplicity in dressing, Elon musk’s way of designing tesla, Ratan Tata’s humility and charitable activities, all of these can be simply known through a simple google search. With clear instructional guidelines we have learned to cook recipes, learn languages across the globe.
Looking at these expert videos makes us feel that the same behavior could be replicated, and results are going to be duplicated. However, vicarious learning as explained by Albert Bandura, ‘Learning through observing is illusionary’. You may feel confident looking at online tutorials but making one feel like an expert.
Many Skills Are Easier Seen Than Done
Google has influenced the way we receive and access information. Dr Matthew Fisher from yale had interesting discovery. He found that instead of storing information internally, people outsource to it externally through internet and retrieve it whenever required. To test this he and his colleagues asked participants series of questions that were difficult but appeared to be easy on face. These were those questions which people thought they knew answer about but they wouldn’t in reality. Some were allowed access to internet while others weren’t. Across five experiments, they found that those who searched internet could remember least and performed worst in the learning assessment. The people who had allowed to do online search before test vastly overestimated their capabilities to answer the questions correctly. They though they had mastered the subject and were better at it than others who didn’t. This misattribution of knowing to learning information is salient and reduces likelihood of remembering.
This is probably the reason why millennials think they know but don’t score in exam. This is the same reason recipes look very easy while watching at video but turns out to be time consuming and difficult. Let’s reflect about so many times there were concepts those we thought we know but couldn’t be retrieved accurately. Think about it. What makes people over-confident? Are we unable to distinguish between what is stored in our brain and what is there in our mind?
Less Confident People Are More Successful
The biggest cliché in today’s world is that the most successful are most confident. By being more confident can you really become CEO of Reliance or the next Obama. Is that a reality to the success?
It’s a myth. People who are less confident are often realistic and strive for attainable goals. It doesn’t mean extremely low confidence is good or people with that will do good. It rather means having a low confidence stands you a better chance at succeeding than if you have over confidence. Lower confidence can help you to work harder and prepare more. Lower confidence reduces the chances of being arrogant, deluded or know it all.
The research by Fischer zeroed down to the finding that people were illusionary. The people with high confidence even when they searched through data base and got irrelevant or no results, they were far more confident that they had known answers to even random and unrelated questions.
So Sure But So Wrong
Overconfidence in predictions leads to dramatic results. We typically see those reflected into poor decision making, wrong weather forecast, bad financial analysis. So what does this mean? With some professions we respect people to be truly knowledgeable. Surgeons for example needs to be highly proficient and must rely on their studies rather than use half baked knowledge from internet. Pilots should know better about fuel engine than before it shows alert or damages the flight.
It’s obvious that internet has it’s benefits. It is also accessible and most effortless way of acquiring knowledge, but the question remains the same. How reliable is it in real as compared to trust we place on it? So, what we were never really that smart we just thought we could get quick answers to complex questions in our head.
A Wise Guess
Netflix organized a campaign for online movie rental success. They had a technology named Cinematch which helped millions of customers find a good match for their interests. Software engineers at Netflix previously used these fancy algorithms which would allow users to recommend movie amongst the thousands of those films. This algorithm had one problem in predicting the films that is it would recommend most of the best sellers ignoring the less popular movies.
How to resolve this issue? Netflix announced a million dollars prize to anyone who could improve their film suggestion process by 10%. Most of the people who participated were math whizzes and computer expert. A group of Princeton alums & team of AT&T achieved second and first place by 8% and 8.43%. Both teams used complex formulas to improve the formula. Still, they couldn’t achieve 10% required to win 1 million dollars.
Gavin Potter neither computer scientist nor programmer, his attempt to improve Netflix algorithm by 8.97%. This 40 years old when asked why he joined the quest, he said it looked like the fun. The value this psychologist brought to this computer field is lot more to do with the way the human brain works than shaping an algorithm to satisfy a computer. The technological advancement in artificial intelligence, augmented reality and other IOT services doesn’t suffice or outsmart the human intelligence.
A Way To Outsmart Our Own Biases
So the internet make us feel like I know it all. Didn’t I already know that? That’s obvious right. If I suppose you were evaluating the candidate to join your team. You have list of competencies set as per your job description. You meet this candidate whose resume totally fir in with the skills and competencies required. She has this impeccable communication skills, but you get that feeling of something doesn’t fit in. It’s hard for you to describe but something is fishy. What do you do? Do you hire her?
Most people would go with their intuition which was guided by their past experience. It’s helping you make good choices if you don’t know what happens when you ignore it. The problem is unless you go with a very strong logic a common source of bias arising from the information gathered in this internet age and stored without processing it further results to an epic failure.
How to stay relevant and thrive in this internet age?
We know that the technology could change our lives, but could it be used to transform ourselves as well? We are all susceptible to such biases because most of us tend to be highly overconfident in the information acquired digitally which makes us feel like expert. No doubt, some skills are easier to acquire online or are as good as learned the other way round. However, it is important to understand the way human brain is wired towards technology. In a simple manner how is technology influencing the way we process information.
Real expertise can be develop by skillfully separating information and learning through reflecting. It’s important to dig ourselves deep down to allow processing than automatic consumption of information. It permits to make a wise guess in face of risk and uncertainty.
Work Cited:
- “Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge;” Matthew Fisher, MA, Mariel K. Goddu, BA, and Frank C. Keil, PhD; Yale University; Journal of Experimental Psychology: General: online March 31. 2015.
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