Googling stuff can cause us to overestimate our own knowledge

The internet has changed the way we do many things, from organising a get-together to looking up a recipe. Tasks that little over a decade ago would have involved dozens of phone calls or a trip to the library, can now be completed in a heartbeat. There has been much animated debate about the potential relative harms or benefits of all this, but convincing evidence has not been forthcoming. Now a new study of 119 men and 83 women recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General has found that after accessing information on the internet, people can experience an illusion of knowledge. Even if the internet hasn’t necessarily changed the way we think, it seems it does have the potential to change our perceptions of what we think we know.

From BPS Research Digest: Googling stuff can cause us to overestimate our own knowledge