"The Internet makes you think you’re smarter than you really are"

From Fusion:

As anyone who’s ever consulted their phone to look up the name of the actor who played that kid in that 80s sitcom and also the kid in that movie with the dog* knows, having easy access to the Internet can make us humans feel supernaturally smart—but cut off our connection, and alas, we return to our mortal mental state.

According to a new study, folks tend to ignore this distinction and mistake the knowledge provided by the Internet as our own. That’s right—we think we’re smarter than we actually are because of Google. Sorry, but you probably don’t know the title of every episode of Buffy or why cats purr or exactly why you can’t get an STD from a toilet seat without technological assistance.

“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,” said Matthew Fisher, lead researcher on the study, in a statement. The study appears in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Experimental Psychology.

“It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source,” he said. “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.”...MORE