London - It provides easy answers to difficult questions but Googling can fool us into thinking we are smarter than we actually are.
People who searched for information on the internet had an over-inflated sense of their own intelligence afterwards, a study found.
Asked questions on completely unrelated topics, they maintained they knew more than others.
For instance, volunteers who scoured the internet for information on how a zip works then maintained they were more knowledgeable on climate science than people who hadn’t done a computerised search.
A second experiment suggests they thought their heads were holding more information. Asked to pick a brain scan that looked most like theirs, they choose images of brains that were more active.
Lead researcher Matthew Fisher, of Yale University in the US, said this inflated sense of knowledge could lead to people making bad decisions.
He warned: ‘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. 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.’
Writing in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Fisher said that the ease of internet searches may be to blame.
Combing encyclopaedias or questioning experts for knowledge take times time and effort and it is clear whether you are successful.
In contrast, ‘with the internet, the lines become blurry between what you know and what you think you know’.
Fisher said: ‘Where decisions have big consequences, it could be important for people to distinguish their own knowledge and not assume they know something when they actually don’t.
‘Accurate personal knowledge is difficult to achieve, and the internet may be making that task harder.’
Researcher Frank Keil, a psychology professor, said the growing popularity of smartphones may be exacerbating the problem because an internet search is always within easy reach.
He said the problem may get even worse in years to come, as today’s computer-savvy children grow up.
Daily Mail