3 ms·

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 = 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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."

luu 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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."