Causation No.3

More Google antics to write about today. I apologise but searching Google has been an important part of my work for the past few years and I still find it fascinating to explore. In my last job, which finished on Thursday, I was often called upon to delve into psychological research and to attempt to break it down to its barest essentials. The problem, as always, is that the truth is both obscure and complicated while that which is straightforward and accessible tends to be a load of over-simplified nonsense. Such is the joy and the agony of life.

In my last few days, I was given a particularly tricky problem to solve - what causes people to become competitive? The academic literature was of no help. There were some murmerings of genetic inheritance in a few twin studies, and a note was made of the difference between cultures in this trait. However, no-one was willing to speculate as to which social factors bring about this contrast. As is often the case, the intellectual fraternity prove disappointingly relunctant to indulge the quest of the populariser for boil-in-the-bag truth. There are some people, of course, with fewer scruples but these are not the sort who publish articles in scientific journals. This is where Google comes in.

As a bit of a Google-whizz (if I do say so myself), I have mastered the art of the search term in the form of a phrase fragment, as a way of getting to the nub of the matter. So I began to tackle this conundrum by choosing some plausible fragments for which to search. The first one I tried was "makes people competitive" and I was gratifyingly rewarded with the following list, all in the first two pages of hits:

globalization makes people competitive
compound interest makes people competitive
kiasu makes people competitive
and (several times) the Bloody Mary, like barbecue sauce or oatmeal cookies, makes people competitive

The second attempt "causes competitiveness" produced these results:

a vacuum of values in people's lives causes competitiveness
a certain golf training kit causes competitiveness
the lust for Cinderella-wear causes competitiveness

Well, that clears that up then. Case closed.