London: Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook may be making us stupider by making it hard for people to think for themselves, a new study suggests.

Speed, volume and ease with which information is shared through social networking sites may be making it more difficult for us to think analytically, researchers say.

Scientists including Dr Iyad Rahwan, an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, investigated if networks help us imitate analytical thought processes from our peers.

To carry out their experiment they tested university students with a series of brain-straining questions.

As many as 100 volunteers were separated into 5 social networks each with 20 individuals. Connections between the people in the networks were assigned randomly by a computer to fit 5 different network patterns.

At one extreme all the people in the network were connected directly to all the others, and at the other extreme there were no connections at all.

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