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By David Rothman

EinsteinThe Mind Hacks blog is questioning the usefulness of the the study saying email lowers IQ. Of course it does. So do other distractions.

The much-hyped study apparently didn’t claim that the IQ reduction is lasting. In fact, gasp, isn’t it possible that multi-tasking emailers are increasing their mental abilities by stretching them? If you go around all day with weights strapped to your back, you won’t be able to run as quickly as people without them. But you’ll most likely grow stronger than otherwise. Might the guy to the left have ended up even smarter in certain respects if he’d used e-mail more often? Not in all ways and not necessarily those conducive to his particular line of work. But some.

Meanwhile other bells are going off in my email-addled mind. Dr. Glenn Wilson, author of the study, refused to release the full material directly to a skeptic, referring him instead to the less-than-cooperative Hewlett Packard PR department. I myself have a few pesky questions about the psychologist’s scientific qualifications as the ultimate IQ maven.

Dr. Wilson is out of King’s College at the University of London. One directory listing from the college describes him as an expert in “Personality; sexual behaviour; male-female differences; social behaviour; performing arts psychology; fame and celebrity.” Wilson enjoyed some of the latter through the globally distributed news story about his study, but is he really among the world’s top experts on IQ? Maybe he is. I don’t know.

Another listing does mention “personality and individual differences” and “measurement and theory,” but if all this is so important, why isn’t the information in the first-mentioned listing?

A third listing, from the Institute of Psychology at King’s, gives the impression that Dr. Wilson cares far more about such issues as sexual arousal than about IQ. I’m just going by a list of his published works.

Other questions arise, such as the refusal of Dr. Wilson to release the full material. One commenter in the Mind Hacks blog observes:

I’ve just spoken to HP’s Kerry Gaffney (as mentioned in the press release) and have been told the details of the study are “not available for public consumption” (although I’m being sent an email of statistics from the survey).

In other words, it is impossible to tell whether the experimental study was sound; particularly what IQ measure was used and how the phone calls and emails were presented to participants.

Therefore, it seems the study doesn’t even make the lowest grade of scientific validity as it cannot even be inspected by professionals in the field.

Unless the experimental details are published, I’m afraid this one is junk science at its worst.

If the skepticism is valid, why is the BBC taking the man so seriously. Normally the BBC is pretty clueful compared to the usual media outlet. But in this case did it fall for PR spin the way so many old-line media organizations do?

 
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