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"We like to think that more information drives smarter decisions; that the more details we absorb, the better off we'll be. It's why we subscribe to Google Alerts, cling to our iPhone, and fire up our Tweetdeck. Knowledge, we're told, is power. But what if our thirst for data is actually holding us back? What if obsessing over information actually reduces the quality of our decisions? That's the question raised by Princeton and Stanford University psychologists in a fascinating study titled On the Pursuit and Misuse of Useless Information."

"GIVEN the widespread adoption of smartphones, text messaging, video calling and social media, today's professionals mean it when they brag about staying connected to work 24/7." Too much connectivity can damage the quality of one's work, says Robert Sutton, author of "Good Boss, Bad Boss" and a professor at Stanford. Because of devices, he says, 'nobody seems to actually pay full attention; everybody is doing a worse job because they are doing more things." Mobile devices and social media, he says, "make us a little more oblivious, a little more incompetent." Just recall those pilots who overshot their destination two years ago because they were using computers, he adds.

The mass media, including interactive social-networking tools, make you passive, can sap your initiative, leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone. Enlarge This Image Apparently even during a revolution. That is the provocative thesis of a new paper by Navid Hassanpour, a political science graduate student at Yale, titled "Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest." Using complex calculations and vectors representing decision-making by potential protesters, Mr. Hassanpour, who already has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford, studied the recent uprising in Egypt. His question was, how smart was the decision by the government of President Hosni Mubarak to completely shut down the Internet and cellphone service on Jan. 28, in the middle of the crucial protests in Tahrir Square?