All posts tagged: depends

Is AI making us dumber? Depends how it’s used

Is AI making us dumber? Depends how it’s used

Published by Miika Tikkanen

AI today can write our class essays, plan our meals and draft our emails. But not everyone agrees on whether this type of help is good or bad. Recent headlines have warned that artificial intelligence will not just make us lazy and stupid; they’ve suggested AI could lead to the downfall of civilization. But the truth may lie somewhere in the middle of those best- and worst-case scenarios, says Trent Cash. He’s a behavioral scientist at University of Waterloo in Canada. The type of AI tool and how it’s used make all the difference in whether someone hangs onto or picks up skills, new data show. AI will most likely weaken our skills when it simply does the work for us. “If we offload a specific skill to AI,” Cash says, “we’re probably not going to retain that skill particularly well.” Staying engaged while using AI — by learning from its feedback or examples — may, however, enhance our skills. Fears of AI whittling away human intelligence like some sort of digital pocketknife are likely overblown, Cash says. …

Will More Arguments Make You More Persuasive? It Depends

Will More Arguments Make You More Persuasive? It Depends

Published by Jenni Sidey

You are trying to convince someone — your friend, a client, your spouse — to take some action or change their belief, and you have lots of supporting arguments to make. Should you simply pile on all of the arguments in favor of your position? Or, would the other person think that you were “trying too hard” and be turned off by all of your arguments? More traditional research suggests that having more arguments makes you more persuasive. A very recent study, however, suggests that it’s more complicated than that. While using more arguments in a persuasion attempt may make you look more like an expert, presenting a lot of arguments may also make the target person skeptical about your intentions. They may wonder, does this person have ulterior motives and is just trying to “sell” me on this? A series of recent studies (Bergman et al., 2025) explored these factors and has contested the general belief that more arguments are more persuasive. In these experiments, people were given varying numbers of arguments (1, 3, …

Should You Correct Someone Who Misspeaks? It Depends

Should You Correct Someone Who Misspeaks? It Depends

Published by Jenni Sidey

Your spouse mistakenly gives inaccurate directions to the airport where someone is rushing to catch a flight. Your ride share driver boldly misstates the purpose of a drug you prescribe frequently as a physician. Which of these people do you correct—and how? When necessary and done gracefully, correction is valuable and can strengthen relationships. Yet in addition to time and place, tone matters too. The type of correction that comes under scrutiny most often is the kind that makes others uncomfortable because it is public, embarrassing, or even humiliating. Yet for people who merely want to be helpful, without alienating the person being corrected, where is the line? Research has some helpful tips. Public Correction: Harmful or Helpful? Raffael Heiss et al. (2025) examined the impact of peer correction of alleged misinformation on social media platforms.[i] Focusing on the impact of civility, they investigated how tone matters to the person being corrected and determines relational outcomes. They found that civil correction was linked with more success and positive relationship-related outcomes, while uncivil correction had negative …