The brain in your pocket: Evidence that Smartphones are used to supplant thinking q Nathaniel Barr 1 , Gordon Pennycook ⇑,1 , Jennifer A. Stolz, Jonathan A. Fugelsang Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Canada article info Article history: Keywords: Smartphone use Internet use Cognitive miserliness Dual-process theories Extended mind Situated cognition abstract With the advent of Smartphone technology, access to the internet and its associated knowledge base is at one’s fingertips. What consequences does this have for human cognition? We frame Smartphone use as an instantiation of the extended mind—the notion that our cognition goes beyond our brains—and in so doing, characterize a modern form of cognitive miserliness. Specifically, that people typically forego effortful analytic thinking in lieu of fast and easy intuition suggests that individuals may allow their Smartphones to do their thinking for them. Our account predicts that individuals who are relatively less willing and/or able to engage effortful reasoning processes may compensate by relying on the internet through their Smartphones. Across three studies, we find that those who think more intuitively and less analytically when given reasoning problems were more likely to rely on their Smartphones (i.e., extended mind) for information in their everyday lives. There was no such association with the amount of time using the Smartphone for social media and entertainment purposes, nor did boredom proneness qualify any of our results. These findings demonstrate that people may offload thinking to technology, which in turn demands that psychological science understand the meshing of mind and media to adequately char- acterize human experience and cognition in the modern era. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ‘‘...the medium is the message... the personal and social conse- quences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.’’ [McLuhan (1964), p. 8] 1. Introduction McLuhan (1964) turned the attention of the world to the impact that technological change can impart by famously proclaiming ‘‘the medium is the message.’’ The internet, although now ubiqui- tous, is a recent addition to our society that has afforded unprece- dented access to information of nearly every possible kind. This easily accessible online knowledge base has largely supplanted other media in terms of acquiring knowledge for daily life. As such, few, if any, media have been as monumental as the internet. First bounded by wires, next by proximity to a router, the advent and rise of the Smartphone means that the internet and the massive knowledge base it contains now knows no bounds for billions. Soon the number of Smartphones in use will be in the billions and the anticipated power of such devices is expected to continue to grow at a rate reminiscent of science fiction rather than science fact (Miller, 2012). Smartphones have undeniably become a medi- um with a very important message – a message that has yet to be deciphered. 1.1. The extended mind The extended mind – the notion that the mind goes beyond grey matter – is an idea that allows an understanding of human cognition as acting in a coupled system with the environment (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Clark, 2008). In the seminal work on this topic, Clark and Chalmers (1998) define an extended cognitive sys- tem as an external object that serves to accomplish a function that would otherwise be attained via the action of internal cognitive processes. A simple example is the jotting down of a number on paper, rather than maintaining that same information in memory. The technological properties of Smartphones provide an exciting and interesting new means of externalization. Such devices go http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.02.029 0747-5632/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. q Funding for this study was provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. ⇑ Corresponding author at: Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada. E-mail address: gpennyco@uwaterloo.ca (G. Pennycook). 1 These authors contributed equally to this work. Computers in Human Behavior 48 (2015) 473–480 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Computers in Human Behavior journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbeh