From search engines to smartphones, every day, we rely on technology to get the job done. It's so much a part of our lives that we're overconfident of it, always trusting that it will work.
A new study done by researchers at the University of Missouri recently showed that this overconfidence also influences us in other ways, and can even result in us making poor decisions.
"Technology has advanced to the extent that people may not understand how a particular technology works, but they do assume that it will work," says Chris Robert, associate professor of management at the university's College of Business. "We found that people unconsciously associate technology with the notion of success, and this association influences decisions about things like financial decisions, and forecasts of business performance. It is important to determine how this assumption may affect people's choices because many important decisions involve technology in some fashion."
For example, some people may choose not to have a healthy diet because they trust that technology will exist when they get older that will cure any ailments they get. However, even more likely, is that when new technology emerges, even if it's untested, investors will pour more money into it, regardless of whether they actually know it works or not.
This overconfidence in technology is the "technology effect." This happens because we're always around successful technology, and never see those technological products and services that failed because they never make it to market and were never publicized. We do this in spite of the fact that we don't understand it, but it works, and that's what's important to us.
This is why people get excited about the next iPhone but tend to ignore tech that we're already familiar with, such as telephones, electricity and solar power.
Because of that overconfidence, technology affects our decision-making, even in our regular lives.
In their study, researchers measured how one group of participants unconsciously associated technology with success and asked another group to make business-oriented decisions based on new technology with which they were or were not familiar. A third group made investment decisions based on technology-related stocks. In that study, participants overwhelmingly invested in technology, even though those stocks weren't expected to do any better than other options.
Researchers urge those making decisions around technology to carefully weigh their choices first.
"This belief could affect how governments make decisions about allocations of resources, how corporations make decisions about research and development, or how individuals make purchase and investment decisions," says Robert. "Because this bias tends to occur especially when the technology in question is unfamiliar, it would be wise to seek the opinion of someone with expertise in that specific technology, especially when making financial decisions."
Photo: Karlis Dambrans | Flickr
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