Searching for data on the Internet makes us think we are smarter, according to a study

Do we overestimate our intelligence by having too much information available?

Internet search engines and encyclopedic websites are a powerful tool when it comes to finding all kinds of information in a matter of seconds. However, our relationship with the cyber world is not only one-way. We are also affected by our use of the Internet, even if we do not realize it. For example, a recent article published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that the simple fact of using the network to access information may be making us think we are smarter than we really are..

Researchers Matthew Fisher, Mariel K. Goddu, and Frank C. Keil, of Yale University, believe that simply perceiving that we are capable of accessing massive amounts of information quickly through electronic devices makes us more likely to overestimate our level of knowledge. This hypothesis is supported by one of their latest investigations, in which they experimented with people who actively searched for data on the Internet and others who did not.

The different variants of the experiment show how the simple fact of having carried out an Internet search is sufficient for participants to significantly overestimate their ability to retain and use information without consulting the Internet.

Questions and scales

Fisher and his team's research began with a first phase in which volunteers were asked a series of questions. However, some of these people were not allowed to use any external source of information, while the rest had to find an answer for each question on the Internet. Once this phase had passed, the volunteers were asked new questions related to topics that had nothing to do with what they had been asked previously. The participants had to rate on a scale of 1 to 7 the degree to which they thought they were able to give explanations to questions related to the subject matter of each of the questions posed.

The results of the statistical analysis showed that people who had consulted the Internet were significantly more optimistic when it came to the questions posed. were significantly more optimistic when it came to rating themselves on their ability to offer explanations for the topics to offer explanations on the topics covered in the questions.

However, to complement the results obtained, the researchers decided to create a more complete variant of the experiment in which, before having the possibility to search for an answer to a question with or without the help of the Internet, all participants had to rate their perception of their own level of knowledge on a scale between 1 and 7, in the same way as they would have to do in the last phase of the experiment.

In this way it was possible to verify that in the two experimental groups (people who would use the Internet and those who would not) there were no significant differences in the way they perceived their own knowledge level.. It was after the phase in which some people searched for information on the Internet that these differences emerged.

More experiments on this subject

In another version of the experiment, the researchers focused on making sure that members of the two groups saw exactly the same information, to see how people are influenced by the simple fact of actively searching for data on the Internet, regardless of what they find.

To do this, some people were given instructions on how to go and look up specific information about the question on a particular website where that data could be found, while the rest of the people were directly shown those documents with the answer, without giving them the possibility to look it up for themselves.The people with the possibility to look up the information online continued to show a clear propensity to think they were somewhat smarter, judging by the way they self-scored on the scales from 1 to 7.

The test to which the volunteers were subjected had a few more variants in order to control as well as possible the variables that could contaminate the results. For example, in successive experiments, different search engines were used. And, in an alternative version of the test, the scoring of the knowledge level itself was replaced by a final phase in which the volunteers had to look at several brain scan images and decide which of these pictures most closely resembled their own brain.. Consistent with the other results, people who had been searching the Internet tended to choose the images in which the brain showed the most activation.

What made participants overestimate their knowledge was not the fact that they had found an answer to a question on the Internet, but the simple fact that they could search for information on the Internet. The researchers realized this when they saw how those who had to find an impossible-to-find answer on the Internet tended to overestimate themselves as much as those who did find what they were looking for.

A price to pay

These results seem to speak to a Mephistophelian contract between us and the Internet. Search engines offer us the virtual possibility of knowing everything if we have an electronic device nearby, but, at the same time, this could make us more blind to our limitations in finding answers on our own, without the help of anything or anyone. In a way, this brings us back to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. We may have been blessed with the ability to believe that things are simpler than they really are, and it is even possible that this is very useful in the vast majority of cases. However, this could become a problem when we have such a powerful resource as the Internet at hand.

It is important not to get lost and end up sacrificing at the altar of the god Google our ability to judge our skills. After all, the network of networks is sufficiently extensive that it is difficult to find the point where our neurons end and the fiber optic cables begin.

Bibliographical references

• Fisher, M., Goddu, M. K. and Keil, F. C. (2015). Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, accessed online at http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-0000.....