‘Searching the internet makes people think they are smart’

People who search the Internet for information feel smarter than they actually are, according to research by Yale. Access to information is confused with one’s own understanding of that information.

That is reported this week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. To find out whether people who use the internet to find information do indeed see themselves as better informed than others, the researchers set up nine different experiments. One of the most startling results was the fact that individuals in the study who were looking for something and couldn’t find it continued to ascribe to themselves an increased sense of knowledge. People who did an internet search also felt that they showed more activity in their brains than the group that had to spew knowledge without having an online search tool to hand.

The nine experiments were conducted with 152 to 302 participants. Different participants were used for each experiment. In an experiment, the internet research group had to investigate four questions, such as ‘how does a zipper work?’ and had to provide a link to a website with the best answer. The control group was given the text of the most common website that the internet group used to arrive at the answer. Afterwards, both groups had to answer other questions that were not related to the Internet searches, such as ‘why is a cloudy night warmer?’ Despite the fact that neither group was given the opportunity to search for an answer this time, the internet group found itself significantly better able to answer these questions in its own assessment.

The cognitive effect of ‘being in search mode’ on the Internet may be so powerful that people still feel smarter even when the search yields nothing. The latter was part of the test for questions such as ‘Why is the early history of Kush more peaceful than the Greek one?’ and when using certain filters, which were set so that no answers could be found.

In experiments with images from an fmri scanner, the internet searchers thought that the images with a lot of brain activity must be from people who were searching. It was made clear to the participants in this study beforehand what the different illuminated brain areas represented. This result suggests that the participants who used the internet for searching thought they had more knowledge in their heads and not that they possessed that knowledge through internet access.

All questions can be found in the PDF from page 12.