According to a new study, the Internet won't make you any smarter, but it can make you feel much smarter than you actually are. The ability to search for answers online gives people an inflated sense of their own knowledge and even makes people think they know more than they really do.
"We think the information is leaking into our head, but really the information is stored somewhere else entirely," says Matthew Fisher, doctoral student in cognitive psychology at Yale University. Fisher surveyed hundreds of people to see how the Internet affected how they rate their knowledge.
He began with a simply survey asking questions such as "How does a zipper work?" or "Why are there leap years?" He allowed half of his subjects to use the Internet to help them find the answers while the others were not allowed any outside resources.
He then had his subjects rate how well they could answer other unrelated questions such as "Why does Swiss cheese have holes?" He found that people that were allowed to go online for the answers tended to rate their knowledge higher than people who couldn't use any outside resources.
Next, Fisher tried to make sure they used the same sources. He told the Internet-enabled group to search for the page scientificamerican.com for the answer. The non-Internet group were taken straight to the URL, however. Still, the group that could search for the answer consistently rated their knowledge higher than the group that were forced to use online one site.
He didn't end his tests here, however. He continued by testing other search engines, rewording questions making it clear he only wanted one subjects answer, filtered searches, and more. The results kept coming back the same.
There are practical consequences to this experiment. If we can't accurately judge someones knowledge about a subject, who's to say whether any of the decisions we make are well-informed?
"People are unlikely to be able to explain their own shortcomings," Fisher says. "People aren't aware of the quality of explanation or the quality of arguments they can produce, and they don't realize it until they encounter the gaps."
According to Fisher, the more we rely on the Internet the more difficult it will be to find the line between where our knowledge ends and the Internet begins.
"We are not forced to face our own ignorance and ask for help; we can just look up the answer immediately. We think these features make it more likely for people to consider knowledge stored online as their own."
