Exploring the Cognitive Consequences of Social Search

This document summarizes a study exploring the cognitive consequences of social search. The study investigated how people use social resources like friends and social networks during search tasks. It found that combining multiple social search tactics like searching, targeted asking, and network asking led to better task performance than using tactics alone. The number of facts found and how deeply users processed information correlated with using multiple tactics. The study also found that people did more cognitive processing when composing questions for their network than when receiving information.