A Carnegie Mellon University study reveals starting your brainstorming process with Google can be detrimental to the group's creativity.
Teams relying much on search engines often produced inundatingly same, less original ideas due to a cognitive bias called "fixation effect," where seeing popular answers converges our thought process instead of diverging it.
While individuals weren't necessarily dumber with Google, groups of Google users seemed to get stuck in a rut, often coming up with the same common ideas, sometimes even in the same order! Talk about a copy-and-paste creativity crisis.
"This appears to be due to the fact that Google users came up with the same common answers, often in the same order, as they relied on Google, while non-Google users came up with more distinct answers," explained lead author Danny Oppenheimer.