11 ms·

Is Facebook geared to dullards?

60 points by doron 15y ago

tejaswiy 15y ago
NFC = Need for cognition. SNS = Social network site. "The key finding," the authors write, "is that NFC played an important role in SNS use. Specifically, high NFC individuals tended to use SNS less often than low NFC people, suggesting that effortful thinking may be associated with less social networking among young people." Moreover, "high NFC participants were significantly less likely to add new friends to their SNS accounts than low or medium NFC individuals." Seriously? Correlation, Causation etc? Nothing to do with intelligence or the need for cognition here IMO. If you have good social skills, then you're better of on FB too. () = Anecdotal evidence.
- luu 15y ago
  It seems like you're using a colloquial meaning of the phrase "need for cognition", but it has a specific well defined meaning in psychology (see the link in the blog post for a brief description, or Cacioppo, Feinstein, and Jarvis PB 1996, 197-253 for a deeper description). Whether or not NFC measures anything meaningful, and whether or not a single scale factor is sufficient for account for NFC are possibly valid objections, but that it doesn't sound like using facebook requires cognition isn't. That's actually the point. Here's a correlation between NFC and some behavior that isn't particularly cognitively intensive. As for the criticism that it's correlation and not causation, NFC has been shown to be relatively stable, so it's extraordinarily unlikely to be the case that facebook usage lowers NFC. It's possible there's an unknown confounding variable, but no one's going to look into that until a correlation's been established, so it's unfair to attack this study for establishing the link which may get other people to study this more deeply.
  - Alex3917 15y ago
    Does NFC actually correlate with anything? I'm curious to see what (if anything) my score means, but all the papers I'm seeing are behind pay walls.
- jdp23 15y ago
  This is only one of the findings of the study ... Carr didn't bother to quote the rest. From the abstract at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1951356 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1951356 "The findings showed that the SNS use had a negative association with NFC and a positive association with ICT innovativeness. Specifically, people who were more likely to engage in effortful thinking used SNS less often, and those who were high in ICT innovativeness used SNS more often. Meanwhile, those who spent more time on SNS were more likely to be multitaskers."
paulnelligan 15y ago
I'm not sure if facebook is geared to dullards, or if it just dulls the mind ...
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  Almost everyone uses it, but I'm guessing that dumb people spend more time on it. Smart people use it to get in touch with people they haven't seen in a while, whereas dumb people spend 25 hours per week throwing sheep.
  - chadp 15y ago
    Or smart people don't use facebook.
    - michaelochurch 15y ago
      I doubt this. A lot of smart people use it, just not very often or for very much of their day. It's at risk of ending up with the same problem as online dating sites: the average user of one of those sites is a decent, normal person... but the defects spend 20 times as much time (and send 50 times as many messages) on them as everyone else.
      - paulnelligan 15y ago
        that's where the 'remove from friends' option comes in very handy...
michaelochurch 15y ago
This is interesting. I feel like saying "Facebook is geared to stupid people" is offensive and inaccurate, but I've definitely felt like "social" applications have a fatal flaw, which is that they can't succeed without getting progressively dumber over time. The early adopters of services like Facebook and Twitter are smart, curious, technologically-adept people like HN posters. But if the product isn't "dumbed down" a bit, it can't appeal to the masses and can't really grow, and if it stops innovating (which is hard to do while not growing, because VCs aren't likely to fund a product that only 5% of the population is smart enough to use) then the smart people get bored. So, a "social" application feels intense pressure to grow and inevitably becomes stupider (in terms of its users) over time. Add to this the fact that dumb people have more free time and lower standards regarding the use of it, and the usage-weighted average IQ can easily drop below 100. Then you become Myspace. Facebook was built to dumb down harmlessly. It started at Harvard, then the Ivy League, then the top 100 (or so) colleges, then all colleges, then everyone. This was a great strategy for marketing while scaling and it worked. How it will progress from here is unclear. For non-"social" counterexamples, Google and Wikipedia have managed to avoid this by taking what "social" views as a contrarian strategy: instead of trying to suck people in and get them to spend hours on the site (which creates the low time-weighted IQ problem) they try to get people to the information they want as quickly as possible. Google's ideology is, "You're smart enough to know where you want to go, we're just going to get you there." Facebook's is, "We're going to try to suck you in to our space as long as we can."
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  - windsurfer 15y ago
    I think I just made my first startup too: http://abielinski.com/startup http://abielinski.com/startup
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Tycho 15y ago
I want to know if they asked reliable questions like 'how many friends do you have', or ones which people are prone to lie about like 'how much time do you spend on facebook per week?' Maybe the 'NFC' people are just more willing to admit how much time they really waste on FB.
yaarg 15y ago
In other news, snow is white.
jeffere 15y ago
This is kind of a shallow assessment in itself. I'm a social butterfly, let me spread my wings and network! Trivial little snippets of life between me and my best friends, extended social circle and local arts scene all amount to a conveniant and rewarding way to passively share time with friends.
Mizza 15y ago
Facebook is AOL.
chegra 15y ago
"Are you ashamed that you find Facebook boring?" Why, yes. "Are you angst-ridden by your weak social-networking skills?" My God man, you are reading my mind "Do you look with envy on those whose friend-count dwarfs your own?" Sorry, no, you don't get 3 yes. http://changingminds.org/techniques/resisting/yes_yes_no.htm http://changingminds.org/techniques/resisting/yes_yes_no.htm http://changingminds.org/disciplines/sales/closing/yes-set_close.htm http://changingminds.org/disciplines/sales/closing/yes-set_c... When I read the first couple sentences, I felt this guy was trying to sell us something and not necessarily trying to inform us, and what do you know, he is promoting his book at the bottom.
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- gruseom 15y ago
  Carr is a well-established and credible blogger whose position on this has been known for a long time. He certainly hasn't crafted it to support his book, but rather the other way around. And the post does inform us. The study is interesting and I'm glad to hear of it.
- jakkinabox 15y ago
  Weird, I skipped over the part where he was selling the book, even though I read the comments. Thanks for posting this though. It's always good to know peoples motivations for doing stuff as it naturally introduces a bias.
trustfundbaby 15y ago
The conclusion seemed a little simplistic to me, what would have been interesting is seeing how facebook usage varies between NFC's and not-so-NFC types. As in ... do the NFC's try to get news updates and participate more in intellectual discussions on facebook or do they also make banal status like the rest of the folks on facebook. Missed opportunity.
jdp23 15y ago
Without knowing more about the study, I'm skeptical. Back in 2009, a study claiming that Facebook use was correlated with poor academic performance got a lot of press. Once people looked at the data in more detail, though, a different picture emerged -- http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/05/01/facebook_and_ac.html http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/05/01/faceboo... has more.
joblessjunkie 15y ago
Am I alone in feeling that this headline is self-aggrandizing snobbery? Facebook succeeds by providing universal access: it must be a tool that anyone can use. Is a hammer geared to dullards? Is a coffee mug? Just because it is simple enough for everyone to use doesn't equate to being "geared for dullards". I know it's cool to hate on Facebook, but attacking them for one of their key successes is absurd. Now whether Facebook attracts dullards is another matter entirely.... Edit: It's clear that the article references research which is actually interesting and on-topic. However, I'm disappointed to see a headline like this on HN, which both misrepresents and colors the research.
- nkohari 15y ago
  I don't think the author meant that its simplicity (from a user experience perspective) was the reason -- it was what you can do with Facebook that may make it for people who require less of a cognitive challenge. The best software is so simple that anyone can use it, but the converse (simple software is only used by simple people) is definitely not true.
- brlewis 15y ago
  Facebook is designed to maximize engagement. With that goal in mind, what kind of user is more desirable? One who digs into deep issues, or one who spends all day chatting with friends? Sure, the research doesn't say what Facebook's intent is, but if they're seeking to maximize engagement, we can guess where it will go.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    Is chatting with friends for dullards? One who digs into deep issues What does that even mean? In my observation there's a few hundred people in the world who actually "dig into deep issues". They are supplemented by about fifty million others who think they are being deep because have just taken a freshman philosophy class and/or drugs.
    - erikpukinskis 15y ago
      Out of curiosity, which do you think you are?
tokenadult 15y ago
I have just read the fine blog post, which taught me the term "need for cognition." Having read it, I posted a Facebook link to the blog post visible to my 554 FB friends titled with the question, "The suggestion of one research finding is that people who like to use social networking sites don't like intellectual challenge. Can you think of any counterexamples?" I will see what happens over the next several hours. The use case I see most frequently on Facebook among my circle of FB friends is posting links to external publications to elicit discussion--the general use case here at Hacker News. I think people with need for cognition can learn from Hacker News, and if they shape their Facebook friend list intentionally they can learn from Facebook. The second person to Facebook-friend me, connections with whom drew me into the majority of my friend list on Facebook, is a parent I met at conferences on education of gifted children, an occasional participant in email discussions of parenting issues and education reform issues. Over the years I have developed a lot of email relationships (the old-fashioned term would be epistolary friendships http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2006.tb00643.x/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2006.... for friendships maintained mostly by writing letters) with parents all over the world who are frustrated by anti-intellectual school systems and who want education for their children that challenges their children intellectually and helps them learn at full speed throughout childhood. In such a friendship environment, I encounter a lot of intellectual challenge. I have to LOOK IT UP if I make a factual assertion that differs from what someone else thinks (much as many people do here on HN). My friends are not screened by occupation, place of birth, country of citizenship, political persuasion, religion, or any other criterion but interest in pursuing learning and improving education for everyone. I think intellectually curious people make use of Facebook as "free riders" in much the same way they used to make use of AOL as free riders. (This is not even to mention the number of people who learn from HN without posting much here.) I can well believe that many people waste a lot of time on Facebook, so much so that my slogan in Facebook comments is "Friends don't let friends play Facebook games," but high use of social networking sites (FB or HN) is at most a correlate of lower intellectual engagement at the group level, rather than lower intellectual challenge being an invariant outcome of heavy use of social media. The study design reported in the submitted link is not an adequate study design http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html to make the claim that all persons who use social media a lot fail to challenge their thinking. P.S. By the time I had finished typing this comment, I had already received a reply to the submitted link on Facebook: "Well, I don't know people's IQ's, but many of my friends on FB have graduate degrees and almost all of them have bachelor degrees. I think it can provide an extra outlet for those of us who want to have more intellectual discussions and may be limited by our day to day/ face to face interactions." The writer of that comment is a very smart woman now living mostly as a stay-at-home mom for her exceptionally gifted young children (one of whom has been a pupil of mine in the mathematics courses run by my nonprofit organization). As I just edit this comment by adding a few more details, I see other replies challenging the assertion that heavy users of social media are in all cases persons who avoid intellectual challenge. P.P.S. after further edit: A recent comment from a FB friend is "Does the fact that there are multiple Rhodes Scholars on my friend list (and they have regular activity...) count as data?" Of course, that friend knows that that doesn't exactly count as data, but then another friend commented, "Perhaps the high-NFC subjects of this particular study just couldn't find other high-NFC friends on FB." It surely does matter how intentionally one seeds one's friend list and how one models intellectual behavior on FB.
nextparadigms 15y ago
Facebook is becoming more boring every day, though. I've never really used it that much, but I have friend who have, and they are starting to quit it and ignore their accounts because it's becoming boring and spammy.
- lotusleaf1987 15y ago
  The signal to noise has grown much louder. 25 friends in 2005 was worth about 2000 now. I liked it a ton in college when it was just for college students, but now it just seems awkward to talk to everyone you've ever met in your life in one social space. That should only happen at weddings and funerals.
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jonmc12 15y ago
It could very well be that the relationship between NFC and certain forms of social interaction in general is very strong and Facebook is simply a reflection of that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition cites a few surveys. Here are some facts about NFC: "need for cognition was related weakly and negatively to being closeminded, unrelated to social desirability, and positively correlated with general intelligence" [http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&fuseaction=showUIDAbstract&uid=1982-22487-001 http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&fuseacti...] "currently enrolled students high in the need for cognition expressed greater life satisfaction than students low in the need for cognition" [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FCR/is_2_38/ai_n6130140/ http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FCR/is_2_38/ai_n6130...] "People high in the need for cognition are more likely to form their attitudes by paying close attention to relevant arguments (i.e., via the central route to persuasion), whereas people low in the need for cognition are more likely to rely on peripheral cues, such as how attractive or credible a speaker is" [wikipedia] "people who are high in the need for cognition scale score slightly higher in verbal intelligence tests but no higher in abstract reasoning tests" [wikipedia] "Research has concluded that individuals high in NFC are less likely to attribute higher social desirability to more attractive individuals or to males" [wikipedia] "The need for cognition is unrelated to social dominance orientation." [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3852/is_200101/ai_n8949421/ http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3852/is_200101/ai_n8...]
- gojomo 15y ago
  Sounds almost like "need for cognition" has a big overlap with simply "introverted".
  - adriand 15y ago
    I don't see where you're getting that conclusion from, based on the items in the comment you're responding to. The chief conclusion about the social interactions of high-NFC people seems to be that they care more about the quality of arguments when being persuaded than the attractiveness of the arguer.
Apocryphon 15y ago
Is Myspace geared to dullards? Is Friendster geared to dullards? Is email geared to dullards? Is the written word geared to dullards? Is chiseling glyphs geared to dullards? Is cave painting geared to dullards?
protomyth 15y ago
I see studies like this and am prone to think ill of them (or the people reporting the results). The sample is "436 college students". This is not really a statistically sound number or demographic slice given the Facebook's current numbers. Also, it seems to have one of those "1 + 1 = cheese" moments in associating simple, behavior, and dullard (which came first "simplifying Facebook or the dullard?"). law of social networks or events: everything was cool when I first got here, but adding the guy after me screwed it up.
- jleader 15y ago
  Keep in mind that as much psychology research as possible is done with college students as subjects. After all, requiring your Psych 101 freshmen to fill out a questionnaire is a lot easier, quicker, and cheaper than recruiting a wider range of subjects. And your "law of social networks" also applies to real-world immigration.
  - protomyth 15y ago
    yeah - it applies to a lot of group dynamics. Working and growing up on a reservation tends to skew my views on immigration. I had to deal with a lot of studies a decade ago and am not very happy when I see crud like this. It filters into the political arena and some really stupid policies come from this crud (Look at any gun violence study and map its participant's locations or check demos on a lot of polls taken in Florida). The sound bite is more important than the procedure.
pstack 15y ago
If I have any social networking anxiety, it's not about friend count. It's anxiety over wasting my life catering to wannabe web personalities trying to build a following via attention-whoring or wasting precious moments of my life scrolling through every mundane update every idiot on my list posts when their new baby farts (or, worse, the ultra sound images and the nine months of constant uninteresting updates that follow). Am I a snob for not giving a fuck about every single second of your life? Fine. Call me a snob, then. My time is too precious to waste stuffing it full of crap about your life. When you have something really important to say that will mean something significant to me, then you can come tell me. Or call me. Or email me directly. You're not the damn Daily News. You're not so important that you need to broadcast your every thought and action to a legion of followers. You can have direct interactions with me. One on one. And if you can't, then whatever it is probably isn't that important in the first place. I have the decency not to bother with Facebook or Twitter. Why? Well, I am a writer. I'm also a bit of an entrepreneur. I also value other people's time and don't feel that every thought I have or action I take is worth sharing with the world. Inf act, I feel that very few are. And when I do have something of value to share, I'm not going to do it on Facebook or Twitter. I'll do it on a website, like we've done for fifteen years and it'll have more thought given to it than a 140 character spam of my new startup or a "so drunk lol!" followed by seventy-eight photos of me getting wasted at a bar, like a rookie.
- savagejen 15y ago
  Yes, you are so clearly concerned with every second of your life that you have time to write this comment.
- ezy 15y ago
  I mean this in the kindest possible way -- but you're a snob. :-) I was resistant to facebook at first, but I've found it a great way to keep in touch. Yes, sometimes people over-share, and sometimes there is a temptation to over-share yourself. But if you're an adult, it's easy to recognize that and make allowances for that in other people. It's part of the human social fabric. And it's quite useful to be able to post vacation photos (as one example), or blast out an update and have group comments -- it seems less isolating, and frankly less annoying, than group email updates when your friends are geographically separated. Do people "collect" friends? Yes... that can happen. But like anything else, you can use it like an adult, and play to it's advantages, rather than it's disadvantages. To some geeks, uninitiated social contact that doesn't make their own special needs primary is an annoyance. But -- trust me, the resulting anger and isolation isn't really worth the curmudgeon act. You are not that busy, you're are probably not solving world hunger, etc... lay off the snobbery. Now Twitter on the other hand, is a little different. Its nature is to be more of a public platform. Something public personalities use -- and in that case, the character limit makes something that should be deeper, much too shallow. I use it as a headline news ticker ('cause the existing RSS tickers are less capable than twitter clients), but don't bother following individuals.
ignifero 15y ago
So, who 's feeling bad, and who's feeling good about yourselves now? I feel good. I have some genius friends on fb who never post. It s the inherent antisocial nature of creative ppl I guess
jradakov 15y ago
Wow. It seems like this research hurt the feelings of some Facebook users. I see Facebook's utility, but I fail to care. The people I care about are already in my life - daily. I see no use in staying abreast of what people I otherwise would not communicate with are currently up to.

60 points by doron 15y ago

NFC = Need for cognition. SNS = Social network site. "The key finding," the authors write, "is that NFC played an important role in SNS use. Specifically, high NFC individuals tended to use SNS less often than low NFC people, suggesting that effortful thinking may be associated with less social networking among young people." Moreover, "high NFC participants were significantly less likely to add new friends to their SNS accounts than low or medium NFC individuals." Seriously? Correlation, Causation etc? Nothing to do with intelligence or the need for cognition here IMO. If you have good social skills, then you're better of on FB too. () = Anecdotal evidence.

luu 15y ago
It seems like you're using a colloquial meaning of the phrase "need for cognition", but it has a specific well defined meaning in psychology (see the link in the blog post for a brief description, or Cacioppo, Feinstein, and Jarvis PB 1996, 197-253 for a deeper description). Whether or not NFC measures anything meaningful, and whether or not a single scale factor is sufficient for account for NFC are possibly valid objections, but that it doesn't sound like using facebook requires cognition isn't. That's actually the point. Here's a correlation between NFC and some behavior that isn't particularly cognitively intensive. As for the criticism that it's correlation and not causation, NFC has been shown to be relatively stable, so it's extraordinarily unlikely to be the case that facebook usage lowers NFC. It's possible there's an unknown confounding variable, but no one's going to look into that until a correlation's been established, so it's unfair to attack this study for establishing the link which may get other people to study this more deeply.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  Does NFC actually correlate with anything? I'm curious to see what (if anything) my score means, but all the papers I'm seeing are behind pay walls.
jdp23 15y ago
This is only one of the findings of the study ... Carr didn't bother to quote the rest. From the abstract at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1951356 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1951356 "The findings showed that the SNS use had a negative association with NFC and a positive association with ICT innovativeness. Specifically, people who were more likely to engage in effortful thinking used SNS less often, and those who were high in ICT innovativeness used SNS more often. Meanwhile, those who spent more time on SNS were more likely to be multitaskers."

paulnelligan 15y ago

I'm not sure if facebook is geared to dullards, or if it just dulls the mind ...

michaelochurch 15y ago
Almost everyone uses it, but I'm guessing that dumb people spend more time on it. Smart people use it to get in touch with people they haven't seen in a while, whereas dumb people spend 25 hours per week throwing sheep.
- chadp 15y ago
  Or smart people don't use facebook.
  - michaelochurch 15y ago
    I doubt this. A lot of smart people use it, just not very often or for very much of their day. It's at risk of ending up with the same problem as online dating sites: the average user of one of those sites is a decent, normal person... but the defects spend 20 times as much time (and send 50 times as many messages) on them as everyone else.
    - paulnelligan 15y ago
      that's where the 'remove from friends' option comes in very handy...

michaelochurch 15y ago

This is interesting. I feel like saying "Facebook is geared to stupid people" is offensive and inaccurate, but I've definitely felt like "social" applications have a fatal flaw, which is that they can't succeed without getting progressively dumber over time. The early adopters of services like Facebook and Twitter are smart, curious, technologically-adept people like HN posters. But if the product isn't "dumbed down" a bit, it can't appeal to the masses and can't really grow, and if it stops innovating (which is hard to do while not growing, because VCs aren't likely to fund a product that only 5% of the population is smart enough to use) then the smart people get bored. So, a "social" application feels intense pressure to grow and inevitably becomes stupider (in terms of its users) over time. Add to this the fact that dumb people have more free time and lower standards regarding the use of it, and the usage-weighted average IQ can easily drop below 100. Then you become Myspace. Facebook was built to dumb down harmlessly. It started at Harvard, then the Ivy League, then the top 100 (or so) colleges, then all colleges, then everyone. This was a great strategy for marketing while scaling and it worked. How it will progress from here is unclear. For non-"social" counterexamples, Google and Wikipedia have managed to avoid this by taking what "social" views as a contrarian strategy: instead of trying to suck people in and get them to spend hours on the site (which creates the low time-weighted IQ problem) they try to get people to the information they want as quickly as possible. Google's ideology is, "You're smart enough to know where you want to go, we're just going to get you there." Facebook's is, "We're going to try to suck you in to our space as long as we can."

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- windsurfer 15y ago
  I think I just made my first startup too: http://abielinski.com/startup http://abielinski.com/startup
  - deleted 15y ago
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Tycho 15y ago

I want to know if they asked reliable questions like 'how many friends do you have', or ones which people are prone to lie about like 'how much time do you spend on facebook per week?' Maybe the 'NFC' people are just more willing to admit how much time they really waste on FB.

yaarg 15y ago

In other news, snow is white.

jeffere 15y ago

This is kind of a shallow assessment in itself. I'm a social butterfly, let me spread my wings and network! Trivial little snippets of life between me and my best friends, extended social circle and local arts scene all amount to a conveniant and rewarding way to passively share time with friends.

Mizza 15y ago

Facebook is AOL.

chegra 15y ago

"Are you ashamed that you find Facebook boring?" Why, yes. "Are you angst-ridden by your weak social-networking skills?" My God man, you are reading my mind "Do you look with envy on those whose friend-count dwarfs your own?" Sorry, no, you don't get 3 yes. http://changingminds.org/techniques/resisting/yes_yes_no.htm http://changingminds.org/techniques/resisting/yes_yes_no.htm http://changingminds.org/disciplines/sales/closing/yes-set_close.htm http://changingminds.org/disciplines/sales/closing/yes-set_c... When I read the first couple sentences, I felt this guy was trying to sell us something and not necessarily trying to inform us, and what do you know, he is promoting his book at the bottom.

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gruseom 15y ago
Carr is a well-established and credible blogger whose position on this has been known for a long time. He certainly hasn't crafted it to support his book, but rather the other way around. And the post does inform us. The study is interesting and I'm glad to hear of it.
jakkinabox 15y ago
Weird, I skipped over the part where he was selling the book, even though I read the comments. Thanks for posting this though. It's always good to know peoples motivations for doing stuff as it naturally introduces a bias.

trustfundbaby 15y ago

The conclusion seemed a little simplistic to me, what would have been interesting is seeing how facebook usage varies between NFC's and not-so-NFC types. As in ... do the NFC's try to get news updates and participate more in intellectual discussions on facebook or do they also make banal status like the rest of the folks on facebook. Missed opportunity.

jdp23 15y ago

Without knowing more about the study, I'm skeptical. Back in 2009, a study claiming that Facebook use was correlated with poor academic performance got a lot of press. Once people looked at the data in more detail, though, a different picture emerged -- http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/05/01/facebook_and_ac.html http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/05/01/faceboo... has more.

joblessjunkie 15y ago

Am I alone in feeling that this headline is self-aggrandizing snobbery? Facebook succeeds by providing universal access: it must be a tool that anyone can use. Is a hammer geared to dullards? Is a coffee mug? Just because it is simple enough for everyone to use doesn't equate to being "geared for dullards". I know it's cool to hate on Facebook, but attacking them for one of their key successes is absurd. Now whether Facebook attracts dullards is another matter entirely.... Edit: It's clear that the article references research which is actually interesting and on-topic. However, I'm disappointed to see a headline like this on HN, which both misrepresents and colors the research.

nkohari 15y ago
I don't think the author meant that its simplicity (from a user experience perspective) was the reason -- it was what you can do with Facebook that may make it for people who require less of a cognitive challenge. The best software is so simple that anyone can use it, but the converse (simple software is only used by simple people) is definitely not true.
brlewis 15y ago
Facebook is designed to maximize engagement. With that goal in mind, what kind of user is more desirable? One who digs into deep issues, or one who spends all day chatting with friends? Sure, the research doesn't say what Facebook's intent is, but if they're seeking to maximize engagement, we can guess where it will go.
- hugh3 15y ago
  Is chatting with friends for dullards? One who digs into deep issues What does that even mean? In my observation there's a few hundred people in the world who actually "dig into deep issues". They are supplemented by about fifty million others who think they are being deep because have just taken a freshman philosophy class and/or drugs.
  - erikpukinskis 15y ago
    Out of curiosity, which do you think you are?

tokenadult 15y ago

I have just read the fine blog post, which taught me the term "need for cognition." Having read it, I posted a Facebook link to the blog post visible to my 554 FB friends titled with the question, "The suggestion of one research finding is that people who like to use social networking sites don't like intellectual challenge. Can you think of any counterexamples?" I will see what happens over the next several hours. The use case I see most frequently on Facebook among my circle of FB friends is posting links to external publications to elicit discussion--the general use case here at Hacker News. I think people with need for cognition can learn from Hacker News, and if they shape their Facebook friend list intentionally they can learn from Facebook. The second person to Facebook-friend me, connections with whom drew me into the majority of my friend list on Facebook, is a parent I met at conferences on education of gifted children, an occasional participant in email discussions of parenting issues and education reform issues. Over the years I have developed a lot of email relationships (the old-fashioned term would be epistolary friendships http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2006.tb00643.x/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2006.... for friendships maintained mostly by writing letters) with parents all over the world who are frustrated by anti-intellectual school systems and who want education for their children that challenges their children intellectually and helps them learn at full speed throughout childhood. In such a friendship environment, I encounter a lot of intellectual challenge. I have to LOOK IT UP if I make a factual assertion that differs from what someone else thinks (much as many people do here on HN). My friends are not screened by occupation, place of birth, country of citizenship, political persuasion, religion, or any other criterion but interest in pursuing learning and improving education for everyone. I think intellectually curious people make use of Facebook as "free riders" in much the same way they used to make use of AOL as free riders. (This is not even to mention the number of people who learn from HN without posting much here.) I can well believe that many people waste a lot of time on Facebook, so much so that my slogan in Facebook comments is "Friends don't let friends play Facebook games," but high use of social networking sites (FB or HN) is at most a correlate of lower intellectual engagement at the group level, rather than lower intellectual challenge being an invariant outcome of heavy use of social media. The study design reported in the submitted link is not an adequate study design http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html to make the claim that all persons who use social media a lot fail to challenge their thinking. P.S. By the time I had finished typing this comment, I had already received a reply to the submitted link on Facebook: "Well, I don't know people's IQ's, but many of my friends on FB have graduate degrees and almost all of them have bachelor degrees. I think it can provide an extra outlet for those of us who want to have more intellectual discussions and may be limited by our day to day/ face to face interactions." The writer of that comment is a very smart woman now living mostly as a stay-at-home mom for her exceptionally gifted young children (one of whom has been a pupil of mine in the mathematics courses run by my nonprofit organization). As I just edit this comment by adding a few more details, I see other replies challenging the assertion that heavy users of social media are in all cases persons who avoid intellectual challenge. P.P.S. after further edit: A recent comment from a FB friend is "Does the fact that there are multiple Rhodes Scholars on my friend list (and they have regular activity...) count as data?" Of course, that friend knows that that doesn't exactly count as data, but then another friend commented, "Perhaps the high-NFC subjects of this particular study just couldn't find other high-NFC friends on FB." It surely does matter how intentionally one seeds one's friend list and how one models intellectual behavior on FB.

nextparadigms 15y ago

Facebook is becoming more boring every day, though. I've never really used it that much, but I have friend who have, and they are starting to quit it and ignore their accounts because it's becoming boring and spammy.

lotusleaf1987 15y ago
The signal to noise has grown much louder. 25 friends in 2005 was worth about 2000 now. I liked it a ton in college when it was just for college students, but now it just seems awkward to talk to everyone you've ever met in your life in one social space. That should only happen at weddings and funerals.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

jonmc12 15y ago

It could very well be that the relationship between NFC and certain forms of social interaction in general is very strong and Facebook is simply a reflection of that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition cites a few surveys. Here are some facts about NFC: "need for cognition was related weakly and negatively to being closeminded, unrelated to social desirability, and positively correlated with general intelligence" [http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&fuseaction=showUIDAbstract&uid=1982-22487-001 http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&fuseacti...] "currently enrolled students high in the need for cognition expressed greater life satisfaction than students low in the need for cognition" [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FCR/is_2_38/ai_n6130140/ http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FCR/is_2_38/ai_n6130...] "People high in the need for cognition are more likely to form their attitudes by paying close attention to relevant arguments (i.e., via the central route to persuasion), whereas people low in the need for cognition are more likely to rely on peripheral cues, such as how attractive or credible a speaker is" [wikipedia] "people who are high in the need for cognition scale score slightly higher in verbal intelligence tests but no higher in abstract reasoning tests" [wikipedia] "Research has concluded that individuals high in NFC are less likely to attribute higher social desirability to more attractive individuals or to males" [wikipedia] "The need for cognition is unrelated to social dominance orientation." [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3852/is_200101/ai_n8949421/ http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3852/is_200101/ai_n8...]

gojomo 15y ago
Sounds almost like "need for cognition" has a big overlap with simply "introverted".
- adriand 15y ago
  I don't see where you're getting that conclusion from, based on the items in the comment you're responding to. The chief conclusion about the social interactions of high-NFC people seems to be that they care more about the quality of arguments when being persuaded than the attractiveness of the arguer.

Apocryphon 15y ago

Is Myspace geared to dullards? Is Friendster geared to dullards? Is email geared to dullards? Is the written word geared to dullards? Is chiseling glyphs geared to dullards? Is cave painting geared to dullards?

protomyth 15y ago

I see studies like this and am prone to think ill of them (or the people reporting the results). The sample is "436 college students". This is not really a statistically sound number or demographic slice given the Facebook's current numbers. Also, it seems to have one of those "1 + 1 = cheese" moments in associating simple, behavior, and dullard (which came first "simplifying Facebook or the dullard?"). law of social networks or events: everything was cool when I first got here, but adding the guy after me screwed it up.

jleader 15y ago
Keep in mind that as much psychology research as possible is done with college students as subjects. After all, requiring your Psych 101 freshmen to fill out a questionnaire is a lot easier, quicker, and cheaper than recruiting a wider range of subjects. And your "law of social networks" also applies to real-world immigration.
- protomyth 15y ago
  yeah - it applies to a lot of group dynamics. Working and growing up on a reservation tends to skew my views on immigration. I had to deal with a lot of studies a decade ago and am not very happy when I see crud like this. It filters into the political arena and some really stupid policies come from this crud (Look at any gun violence study and map its participant's locations or check demos on a lot of polls taken in Florida). The sound bite is more important than the procedure.

pstack 15y ago

If I have any social networking anxiety, it's not about friend count. It's anxiety over wasting my life catering to wannabe web personalities trying to build a following via attention-whoring or wasting precious moments of my life scrolling through every mundane update every idiot on my list posts when their new baby farts (or, worse, the ultra sound images and the nine months of constant uninteresting updates that follow). Am I a snob for not giving a fuck about every single second of your life? Fine. Call me a snob, then. My time is too precious to waste stuffing it full of crap about your life. When you have something really important to say that will mean something significant to me, then you can come tell me. Or call me. Or email me directly. You're not the damn Daily News. You're not so important that you need to broadcast your every thought and action to a legion of followers. You can have direct interactions with me. One on one. And if you can't, then whatever it is probably isn't that important in the first place. I have the decency not to bother with Facebook or Twitter. Why? Well, I am a writer. I'm also a bit of an entrepreneur. I also value other people's time and don't feel that every thought I have or action I take is worth sharing with the world. Inf act, I feel that very few are. And when I do have something of value to share, I'm not going to do it on Facebook or Twitter. I'll do it on a website, like we've done for fifteen years and it'll have more thought given to it than a 140 character spam of my new startup or a "so drunk lol!" followed by seventy-eight photos of me getting wasted at a bar, like a rookie.

savagejen 15y ago
Yes, you are so clearly concerned with every second of your life that you have time to write this comment.
ezy 15y ago
I mean this in the kindest possible way -- but you're a snob. :-) I was resistant to facebook at first, but I've found it a great way to keep in touch. Yes, sometimes people over-share, and sometimes there is a temptation to over-share yourself. But if you're an adult, it's easy to recognize that and make allowances for that in other people. It's part of the human social fabric. And it's quite useful to be able to post vacation photos (as one example), or blast out an update and have group comments -- it seems less isolating, and frankly less annoying, than group email updates when your friends are geographically separated. Do people "collect" friends? Yes... that can happen. But like anything else, you can use it like an adult, and play to it's advantages, rather than it's disadvantages. To some geeks, uninitiated social contact that doesn't make their own special needs primary is an annoyance. But -- trust me, the resulting anger and isolation isn't really worth the curmudgeon act. You are not that busy, you're are probably not solving world hunger, etc... lay off the snobbery. Now Twitter on the other hand, is a little different. Its nature is to be more of a public platform. Something public personalities use -- and in that case, the character limit makes something that should be deeper, much too shallow. I use it as a headline news ticker ('cause the existing RSS tickers are less capable than twitter clients), but don't bother following individuals.

ignifero 15y ago

So, who 's feeling bad, and who's feeling good about yourselves now? I feel good. I have some genius friends on fb who never post. It s the inherent antisocial nature of creative ppl I guess

jradakov 15y ago

Wow. It seems like this research hurt the feelings of some Facebook users. I see Facebook's utility, but I fail to care. The people I care about are already in my life - daily. I see no use in staying abreast of what people I otherwise would not communicate with are currently up to.