How to Improve Your Research Skills
Except for specific exceptions, such as laboratories or libraries, most people do their research on the internet. It has become a quite common pastime. A lot of information is available online, but much of it is contradictory. Luckily, finding the correct information for your purposes is a skill you can learn.
One problem with internet research is that search engines can only return results based on the words in the search box. This is not a flaw of the search engine. It is why we gravitate toward them to find information based on keywords, especially if it is basic knowledge, or evidence to support an article.
The trouble is that a search engine will only give you supporting evidence. If you are trying to debunk your own theory, the keywords you input will not work. Google does not look for opposites (unless, of course, you happen to be searching for antonyms).
This can lead to confirmation bias, when any information we come across seems to support our existing conclusions. We tend to pay attention to only the information we already agree with. This is like following people on social media who only say things you agree with. Eventually, you are stuck in a recursive loop of agreement and have to go out of your way to find a dissenting opinion.
However, if you run across one by accident, you’re liable to respond with the assumption the person must be wrong. Our beliefs are also part of our identity, how we define ourselves. Whether you define yourself by your politics, your interests, your religion, your heritage, or whatever else you feel is central to your being, you don’t want anything messing with “who you are.”
We seek reinforcement of our beliefs by looking for support from others and aligning ourselves with those who feel similarly. And unless we’re exceptionally open-minded, we also resist challenges to those beliefs by avoiding those who feel differently and by ignoring any information that would contradict.
Since writers rarely search for information that conflicts with whatever topic they are covering — that would create cognitive dissonance, a sort of noise in the brain that comes from conflicting information, and that we always try to avoid — confirmation bias is rarely a problem when it comes to internet research.
But even if we did want to learn about opposing viewpoints, it would be difficult to do so using only internet research. When you type a phrase into a search engine, the words in that phrase are what the search engine uses to bring your results. A search engine is only going to return results containing the keywords you’ve entered. Some also use synonyms or “related terms,” but none use antonyms.
People know this. It’s why they regularly use the search engine that consistently gives them the best results for them. There is an adage about computers that applies here: They don’t do what you want; they only do what you tell them to.
Say you read an article positing the popular notion that the human attention span has decreased to eight seconds, reportedly less than that of a goldfish. This is an intriguing idea. You want to know more about it, so you search for it on the internet.
But what about the opposite situation? Maybe you’re not so sure about this theory. In fact, it sounds way off. (If people have an eight-second attention span, how does that explain binge-watching, reading, or even driving?)
I’m sure you’ve heard arguments about the ready availability of information on the internet making us all forgetful because we don’t need to remember. People have been complaining about new media for as long as there have been new media.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about the Egyptian god Theuth and one of the country’s kings. Theuth invents the alphabet and the concept of writing to go with it, and promotes it to the king, saying it will “make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories.” The king parries that writing will, in fact, “implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written.”
So, the idea that technological advancements will make us all idiots is well over 2,000 years old and shows no signs of slowing.
The same thing was said about all new media, from print to movies to radio to TV to the internet. Neil Postman, in his classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, posits that each medium can only present a certain level of idea. As each new medium becomes more visually focused and easier to navigate, the deep thinking required by memorization and the analysis of print is shunted aside in favor of shallower takes. This idea has been continued recently by Nicholas Carr — first in his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” then continued in his excellent book The Shallows.
But these writers, you’ll notice, are focused on depth of thought as opposed to length of attention span. In fact, the only people who seem concerned about length of attention span are parents — who are getting this information off the internet (hypocrites!) — and marketers, whose livelihood depends on people paying attention.
A British consulting firm offers some insight into our easy acceptance of the goldfish story: “The falling attention span sounds intuitively correct. And the comparison with the lowly goldfish makes for an attention-grabbing and memorable statistic.” It’s a good story, it’s visual, and it comes gift-wrapped with the regular deluge of digital media that we just know has to be harming us somehow — so we run with it.
If you want to investigate this theory further, you go to your preferred search engine for deeper research. If you start searching for human attention span eight seconds, the search engine is only going to present articles about that topic. It won’t give you dissenting views because it can only go by the words you type.
If you want different information, you have to use different words. But how do you do that? Let’s think about it.
How about changing the measurement? If the theory is that the human attention span is measured in seconds, maybe you type in minutes or hours instead. Then, see what results you get.
The links offered are primarily going to support this theory. Perhaps there will be some attempting to debunk it, but what you do not get is solid information to the contrary. If your attention span isn’t eight seconds, how long is it?
How do you find out? Specificity.
Instead of continuing to search merely for human attention span data — which will continue to result in the same repeated information — try including a different measurement. If it’s not seconds, maybe it’s minutes, or (as you think) hours. (After all, you’re able to settle in to read a long magazine article, or even a book when time allows.)
The important thing is to be selective. Take the journey. Check your sources. And check their sources. You might end up somewhere you didn’t expect. And that’s the best way to truly expand your knowledge.
Writers online (and the editors who assign their stories) are often satisfied with a single source as long as it supports their hypothesis. If they’re only writing an article because a topic is currently trending, they just want to get it out there and count the clicks. Whether they are spreading misinformation doesn’t enter into their thinking because they found confirmation, which is, unfortunately, enough for most of us.
Don’t be like that. Understand that every writer has an agenda, and that you are likely unaware of it so you cannot take it into account when deciding whether their information has a solid foundation.
