The Google Effect

Search engines have made it possible to find almost any fact in seconds. In 2011, the psychologists Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel Wegner published a series of experiments suggesting that this easy access may be changing the way people use their memory.

In one experiment, participants typed a list of interesting facts into a computer. [A] Half of them were told that the computer would save the facts, while the other half were told that the facts would be deleted. [B] Later, the participants who believed the facts had been deleted remembered them much better. [C] In another experiment, participants saved each fact in one of several folders with simple names. [D] They were often better at remembering which folder held a fact than the fact itself.

The researchers argued that people treat the internet as a kind of external memory, much as they rely on a friend or family member who knows a lot about a certain subject. In their view, this is not necessarily harmful; it may simply be an efficient way of managing information. Other researchers, however, have found it difficult to repeat some of these results, and the size of the effect is still debated.