actually, it turns out stanford beleives that telling someone a hierarchy makes it a hierarchy, and found that people who "do one thing at a time" are easier to convince of this.
in essence, the test has an acute cultural bias.
it would be ever so handy for stanford, eli lilly exxon , or a congressmanto be able to determine for oters what is irrelevant.
the test demonstrates clearly that heavy multitaskers are successful at submitting to authority.
if the expreiment were redone with $5 per correct answer, or, more directly, a piece of chocolate it might give meaningful results.
Media multitaskers—those of you that juggle instant messages, text messages, emails and Web sites all while watching TV—are paying a mental price, according to researchers at Stanford.
Stanford prof Clifford Nass, one of the researchers on the project, put 100 students through a series of media juggling tests and found that multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy.”
According to a Stanford report (Techmeme):
Social scientists have long assumed that it’s impossible to process more than one string of information at a time. The brain just can’t do it. But many researchers have guessed that people who appear to multitask must have superb control over what they think about and what they pay attention to.
Turns out there’s no gift. Multitaskers don’t excel at anything. Multitaskers were frequently distracted. Simply put, media multitaskers couldn’t ignore anything. They were mired in noise.
The lesson: Try one thing at a time. Life is easier that way.
