What is the Google effect?
The Google effect is the tendency of individuals to forget information that they can also find through search engines such as Google (Sparrow, Liu & Wegner, 2007).
The Google effect is also called digital amnesia or busy lifestyle syndrome. People who suffer from the Google effect rely excessively on digital information to "remember" things. They use Google as a kind of external hard drive, also called a 'transactive' memory. After all, why bother remembering something when you can find it back later in no time? Moreover, this way we prevent our brain from being overwhelmed by information.
How does the Google effect occur?
The rise of the Internet and search engines has reduced the poland whatsapp need to memorize information yourself. In fact, all information is available online. Massive cell phone use also contributes to an increase in the Google effect. We are perfectly capable of remembering where to find the information we need, rather than remembering the information itself. Therefore, our brain also gives little priority to storing the information. A disadvantage of this can be that the information online is inaccurate or deleted. For general information or facts this may not be as bad, but for important personal information it is.
The study by Sparrow, Liu & Wegner (2007) also shows that we do store information in our memory if we are told that the information will soon be deleted online. So there is nothing wrong with our memory, it just works differently. New information no longer triggers our long-term memory immediately. There is so much information coming at us every day that we have to choose what to remember or not. The way we learn, solve problems and recall information are all affected by the Google effect. And that can also actually make for greater efficiency (Roberts, 2015). As long as we know where to find it again, memorization has become redundant.
Examples in practice
Do you know your friends' phone numbers by heart? Because you can store so many numbers in your phone, you no longer have to remember them.
When you write something down on a sticky note, you also remember it less because you can always look at your bill.
What were the ingredients of that yummy cake again and in what quantity and proportion did they need to be in the batter? You look for the recipe right there!
When we take a picture of something to be able to look back at it later, we remember the details less well than when we merely observe (Henkel, 2014).