A new study found that the Internet is giving its users the illusion that they are smarter than they really are. With Google and other online search engines just a click away, people feel that they are more clued-up than those who don't depend on the web for answers.
Researchers at Yale University conducted nine experiments involving up to 302 participants to determine whether there is some truth in this "I'm smarter than you" illusion or sense of personal knowledge.
In one experiment, the Internet group was asked to search the answers online on some questions, as well as provide the links where they found the answers. The same questions were given to the control group, or the readers, which did not use the Internet but was provided the same text from the most common website found by the Internet users. Both groups were not required to provide the actual answer. Instead, they were asked to rate their ability to answer the questions.
Another experiment measured the self-perceived activeness of the brains of both groups. The participants were shown some brain scans and were asked to pick which best represent their brains.
The experiments revealed that the Internet users felt smarter than the control group even if they were unable to find the answers to difficult questions. They also felt that their brains were more active than the other group.
"The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world's knowledge at your fingertips," Matthew Fisher, study lead researcher and a fourth-year doctoral candidate in psychology at Yale University, said in the university news release. "It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source. When people are truly on their own, they may be wildly inaccurate about how much they know and how dependent they are on the Internet."
The researchers warned that the sense of personal knowledge of the Internet users could affect their decision-making skills, as they have relied on to the Internet for fast answers compared to the non-Internet users who learned to develop their research skills.
"If you don't know the answer to a question, it's very apparent to you that you don't know, and it takes time and effort to find the answer," Fisher said. "With the Internet, the lines become blurry between what you know and what you think you know."
The study was published in the March 30 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
