Is Facebook geared to dullards?

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.

This is interesting. I feel like saying "Facebook is geared to stupid people" is offensive and inaccurate, but I've definitely felt like "social" applications have a fatal flaw, which is that they can't succeed without getting progressively dumber over time. The early adopters of services like Facebook and Twitter are smart, curious, technologically-adept people like HN posters. But if the product isn't "dumbed down" a bit, it can't appeal to the masses and can't really grow, and if it stops innovating (which is hard to do while not growing, because VCs aren't likely to fund a product that only 5% of the population is smart enough to use) then the smart people get bored. So, a "social" application feels intense pressure to grow and inevitably becomes stupider (in terms of its users) over time. Add to this the fact that dumb people have more free time and lower standards regarding the use of it, and the usage-weighted average IQ can easily drop below 100. Then you become Myspace.

Facebook was built to dumb down harmlessly. It started at Harvard, then the Ivy League, then the top 100 (or so) colleges, then all colleges, then everyone. This was a great strategy for marketing while scaling and it worked. How it will progress from here is unclear.

For non-"social" counterexamples, Google and Wikipedia have managed to avoid this by taking what "social" views as a contrarian strategy: instead of trying to suck people in and get them to spend hours on the site (which creates the low time-weighted IQ problem) they try to get people to the information they want as quickly as possible. Google's ideology is, "You're smart enough to know where you want to go, we're just going to get you there." Facebook's is, "We're going to try to suck you in to our space as long as we can."

I want to know if they asked reliable questions like 'how many friends do you have', or ones which people are prone to lie about like 'how much time do you spend on facebook per week?' Maybe the 'NFC' people are just more willing to admit how much time they really waste on FB.

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.

Facebook is AOL.