Internet search engines give people a wildly exaggerated view of their own intel

Posted by donnie clark on May 18th, 2017

Having immediate access to the sum of human knowledge and experience via the internet is inimitably amazing. However, new research suggests that being able to pull up almost any information with the click of a button could be making people more stupid while simultaneously imparting a false sense of self-perceived intelligence.

A team of psychologists from Yale University evaluated more than 1,000 students who took part in a psychological experiment on the impact of searching the internet. After being asked the question "How does a zip work?", some of the students were told to click on an internet link for the answer while the rest were given a printed sheet containing the same information.

Later, the two groups were quizzed on an unrelated question: "Why are cloudy nights warmer?" Individuals in the group that searched online for the answer to the first question were found to believe themselves smarter than they actually were compared to the group that read the same information on the printed sheet.

For more references you can check : Teaser Video