[Magazine article] Yes, You Are Googling Yourself Stupid

From the April 2015 Good – a magazine for the global citizen

When it comes to actual intelligence, the more time we spend searching online, the more we’re prone to overestimating how smart we actually are.

That, at least, is the conclusion reached by Yale researchers in “Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge,” a paper published last week in American Psychological Association’s Journal of Experimental Psychology. Lead by doctoral candidate Matthew Fisher, the research team administered a series of experiments to over a thousand students in order to test the degree to which internet connectivity affects a person’s sense of their own intelligence. According to The Telegraph:

In one test, the internet group were given a website link which gave the answer to the question ‘how does a zip work’ while a control group were given a print-out of the same information.

When they two groups were quizzed later on an unrelated question – ‘why are cloudy nights warmer?’ the group who had searched online believed they were more knowledgeable even though they were not allowed to look up the correct answer.