Why Google is (and isn’t) Your Best Friend
You’re not searching for an answer. You’re really looking to validate the answer you already have in your mind.
We are the Google generation. With the world’s information easily available at our fingerprints, our generation has pretty much ignored or shut off our intuition, choosing instead to rely on the internet. When it comes to parenting, a new question or dilemma is an almost daily occurrence, so in many ways Google has become our best friend (or Bing if that’s your cup of tea). What’s less obvious is that the internet is actually more like our imaginary friend (that tells us what we want to hear) instead of our true best friend (that tells us what we need to hear), and the reasons go deep into the psychology of the human mind.
When we turn to the internet (or any 3rd party source for that matter), we are looking for an external, credible expert to help us answer a question that we are not sure about. Or that’s what we tell ourselves. This expert can be a pediatrician who’s had formal training or even a mother with absolutely no education, but one that has learned from life experiences. However, if you are honest with yourself, you’ll realize that you actually might not be looking for an external source to tell you the objective right answer. Consciously or not, you already have an opinion of what the “right” answer is (to you) and you are just looking for others to validate your opinion. In psychology, this is known as “confirmation bias.”
Simply stated, confirmation bias “is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.” (Wikipedia)
Some examples of confirmation bias include:
- When you are thinking about investing in a stock (say Snapchat), you will give credibility to the research that explains why it’s a good buy (“Goldman recommends it a buy”) and discard all the indicators suggesting why you should avoid it (“There’s no way Instagram Stories will be a Snapchat killer”).
- If you support a certain political candidate (say Donald Trump), you will give more credence to his purported track record (“He’s a successful businessman”) and downplay evidence of his shortcomings (“The media reporting is inaccurate because they are biased”).
Sidebar: If you’re looking for an interesting read that touches on this more broadly and how we can mitigate this bias, I highly recommend this article from the New Yorker:
As parents, we do this all the time. Let’s suppose you are having a debate on whether to give the baby formula. If you are against formula, you will point to the WHO guidelines that recommend exclusively breastfeeding for the first 6 months. If you are pro formula, you may try to poke holes in the recommendation or point to anecdotal examples of many family members who were formula fed and turned out just fine. Very rarely will you assess the data in a truly objective manner to arrive at an unbiased opinion.
While Google may seem like your best friend because it’s providing all this valuable information to help you make the right decision, you may have already made that decision before you even started. So the next time you and your partner are having an argument about a baby-related decision, just remember that citing online research may not help you solve the argument. In fact, it may just make each of you dig your heels in even further. Confirmation bias is an extremely potent force that can have a polarizing effect.
As humans, this might be one of those behaviors that’s “hard-wired” due to evolutionary factors, so it may not be something we can truly overcome. But I do believe that if we are more mindful of this, we will be more aware of our collective blind spots and perhaps unnecessary escalations can be avoided.
Just some food for thought for the day.
