All that Google searching might be giving you a big head.
Simon Oxenham at BPS Research Digest summarized a study from the Journal of Experimental Psychology that found that after accessing information on the Internet, people might actually be overconfident about what they think they know.
Yale University's Matthew Fisher led a team of researchers conducting a study with 119 men and 83 women from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a web service for individuals and businesses to offer work or request workers for tasks.
They asked a group of participants to use the Internet to answer questions such as “Why are there more women than men?” and “Why are there dimples on a golf ball?” In the control group, participants were asked to answer those questions without help from the Internet. The researchers then asked all participants how confident they were in answering questions, without the Internet, about six different topics: weather, science, American history, food, health treatments and the human body.
The study found that "the participants who had used the Internet to search for answers were more likely to overestimate their own internal knowledge in unrelated areas." In other words, people think they are more knowledgeable than they actually are.
Oxenham notes that "a recurring problem with claims about the potential harms of new technologies is that the criticisms are typically indistinguishable from criticisms of earlier technologies." In other words, "the same claims that are now being made of the Internet were once made of the printing press, and of the pen before that." So the study's finding might not be unique to just the Internet.
Because of that, researchers attempted to focus solely on the Internet as its main point of study by separating it from other forms of receiving information.
For example, the same effect was not found when the participants were simply presented with information that contained the answers to the questions, even if that content was precisely the same as that found online by the internet search group. The researchers achieved this by repeating the experiment with new participants and instructing some of them to search for specific resources, for example: “Please search for the scientificamerican.com page with this information,” while the control participants were simply shown the text from the same websites.
"This finding strongly suggests it was the activity of searching the web, rather than merely having access to external reference information, that led to the illusion of knowledge," Oxenham wrote. "Bizarrely, this remained true even if the search engine was rigged to turn up no useful results whatsoever."
Despite all this, researchers think the medium of the web is an important thing to consider in the study because its accessibility, speed and expertise can cause us to forget about our dependence on it.
And that dependence is something that has been studied before. One team called it the "Google Effect," which explains our tendency to easily forget information when we know it's all saved in a computer and retrievable with just a few clicks.
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