P1 - Cognitive - Digi Tech Flashcards
what is digital technology?
electronic tools, systems, devices and resouces that generate, store or process data. These include social media, online games and mobile phones.
what does the UK’s Office of Communications (2021) say about digital technology?
UK adults spent almost 4 hours a day on computers, tablets and smartphones
18-24 year olds spend an average of 5 hours online a day
what is the google effect?
also called digital amnesia, is the tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by Internet search engines.
what is transactive memory?
knowledge of where information can be found and how to access it, such as dad may not remember birthdays of family members, because he knows mum will remember them. because of the relationships access to the information whenever it is needed, there is no need to commit that info to LTM
in digital technology, what two things do we look for in the studies?
positive or negative influence
reliable or unreliable memory
what does Sparrow et al (2011) aim to look into
To investigate if we invest less effort in committing information to memory if we believe we can simply retrieve the information from an external memory store such as Google, at a later date.
what was Sparrow et al’s (2011) procedure?
2x2 indpendent samples design -
participants asked to type 40 trivia facts into a computer, which represent new knowledge and other facts which are more likely to be known
- save condition : told the computer store everything
- erased condition: told the info would be erased
- save remember: told the computer would store it, but told to try and remember
- erased remember: told the info would be erased, but told to try and remember
what were Sparrow et al’s (2011) findings?
no significant difference to the participants ability to recall trivia when asked to remember
but significant difference if the participant believed that the information would be stored in the computer.
what was Sparrow et al’s (2011) conclusion?
if they believed they would be able to retrieve the information, they made far less effort to remember the information.
- less likely to use memory if you can retrieve it from an external memory store such as google
- using online platforms to remember info means people are less accurate when they are asked to recall it, shows that intial memory was unreliable
critical thinking for Sparrow et al (2012)
+ clearly manipulates IV to establish clear relationship between IV and DV
- research is new and needs testing for reliability, confirmation bias
- relies on trivia information, lacks ecological validity
what is the social comparison theory?
Festinger 1954, shows there is a drive within individuals to have accurate self-evaluations and we determine our self worth based on how we compare to others.
how does social media impact our self evaluations?
- more influenced by negative comparison
- people present ‘best case scenario’ online and this shows upward comparisons
- availability heuristic (Chou and Edge, 2014), are likely to remember the most different from our own, e.g remember posts describing people having the most fun and compare our own experience against the benchmark
what does Chou and Edge (2012) aim to test?
To test the influence of the availability heuristic on how Facebook users evaluate themselves in comparison to other people.
what is Chou and Edge (2012) procedure?
- opportunity sample of 425 US undergraduate students.
- Participants completed a survey including a 10 point Likert scale allowing them to indicate how strongly they agreed with a series of statements such as “many of my friends have a better life than me” or “many of my friends are happier than me”.
- indicated how many hours a week they spent on Facebook, how long they had used FB, the average time spent actually with friends per week, and the number of ‘friends’ on Facebook whom they did not actually know personally.
what are Chou and Edge (2012) findings?
Participants who spent the most hours per week on Facebook were more likely to agree that ‘other people are happier than me’.
By contrast, those who spent the most time out with friends in the ‘real world’ were very unlikely to feel that ‘other people are happier than me’ or ‘many of my friends have a better life than me’.
Interestingly, those participants who reported having a larger number of contacts not personally known to them were very likely to agree that ‘many of my friends have a better life than me’ but did not feel that other people were happier.
what is Chou and Edge’s (2012) conclusion?
The more time spent on Facebook means that examples of other people engaged in exciting, fun, and social activities are more ‘available’ - and Facebook users are very likely to compare their own lives to these examples. In addition, they found that we over-estimate the extent to which the behaviour of other people reflects their disposition rather than their situation.
For example, we tend to think “Mary is always posting exciting status updates because she is much more fun than me” rather than “Mary is away on holiday at the moment; of course, she is posting lots of interesting things”
critical thinking for Chou and Edge (2012)
+ testing young people is appropriate as more engaged with social media
+ Shakya and Christakis (2017) demonstrated negative correlation between liking other content and mental health
- bidirectional ambiguity, did fb reduce mental health, or did they already have it
- self reported data
what is the theory behind the studies that show the positive effect of digi tech?
dual systems theory
