What would you do if someone asked why Swiss cheese has holes? Or how scientists determine the dates of fossils? Or why are there dimples on a golf ball?
Easy. Pull out your smartphone and thumb the question into Google. The internet has made it possible to be an insufferable know-it-all within seconds.
But having that awesome information-bank at our fingertips is blurring the boundary between personal and outside knowledge. Research has shown people are increasingly accustomed to outsourcing tasks to the internet. They remember where to find information and rely on the internet to store it for them. Instant access to a vast repository of outside knowledge is changing the way we think. But is it for the better?
For many the answer is yes. Canadian technology writer Clive Thompson, author of a book called Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, claims the internet age is allowing us to learn more, write and think with global audiences and become more aware of the world around us. For Thompson modern technology is making people "smarter, better connected, and often deeper—both as individuals and as a society".
But now a team of American researchers have discovered a downside: searching the internet makes people feel smarter than they actually are. Yale University psychologists Matthew Fisher, Mariel Goddu , and Frank Keil conducted nine separate experiments involving more than 1000 people to explore how searching the internet affected how they rate their knowledge. The researchers started with a survey which asked questions such as "How does a zipper work?" or "Why are there leap years?" (the questions at the start of this article were also on the list). But only half of participants were allowed to use the internet to help answer the questions. The whole group was then asked to rate how well they thought they could answer a question unrelated to the first one, such as "How do tornadoes form?" Those who had been allowed to search online tended to rate their knowledge much higher than people who answered without any outside sources.
A series of follow-up experiments were conducted to test this finding. In one the participants were asked questions for which there were no answers online, such as "How do wheat fields affect the weather?" and "Why is ancient Kushite history more peaceful than Greek history?" It showed people still had an inflated sense of their own knowledge after searching the internet even when they couldn't find the information they were looking for. The cognitive effect of "being in search mode" on the internet is apparently so powerful that people still feel smarter even when their online searches revealed nothing.
All the tests run by the researchers set came back with the same result – those who did internet searches rated their knowledge base as much greater than those who obtained information through other methods. Matthew Fisher, who led the research, says instant access to a tool as powerful as the internet seems to have made it easier for us to confuse our own knowledge with the knowledge of an external source. Our reliance on internet searches might mean we don't recognise the extent to which we rely on outside knowledge.
But does the illusion of knowledge apparently sparked by internet searches matter? Maybe, according to the researchers. Their paper warns that as the lines between our own knowledge and external knowledge become increasingly blurred people "may unwittingly exaggerate how much intellectual work they can do in situations where they are truly on their own."
Fisher says an inflated sense of personal knowledge can be dangerous anytime high-stakes decisions are being made. "In cases 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," he said. "The Internet is an enormous benefit in countless ways, but there may be some tradeoffs that aren't immediately obvious and this may be one of them. Accurate personal knowledge is difficult to achieve, and the Internet may be making that task even harder."
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