The availability of information seems to be playing a trick on us. It seems to us more and more that we have knowledge about what we really do not know, psychologists say.
How many hearts does an octopus have? What is Voltaire’s real name? What year did the Battle of Hastings take place? With the development of the Internet in general and search engines in particular, anyone can get answers to these (and millions of other) questions in just a couple of seconds. But is it good or bad? Many copies have been broken on this account by authoritative specialists. And while some claim that the Internet makes us dumber, others just as ardently prove that with the help of the global network we are entering the next stage of brain development.
At the same time, the arguments of the supporters of both positions are clearly not enough. Perhaps for this reason psychologists at Yale University (USA) preferred not to get involved in the discussion. Instead, they asked another question: do we ourselves think that the Internet makes us smarter or dumber? And for this purpose they undertook a rather elegant study (1). At the first stage, its participants were divided into two groups and each was given several identical questions. The questions were not to say very difficult, but still required some work to find the answer. Well, for example: how a zipper works, why there are time zones, or how glass is made. At the same time, participants in the first group could use the Internet to search for answers. But the second group did not have such an opportunity; instead of computers, they were provided with only written sources – reference books and dictionaries.
Strictly speaking, the results of this hunt for the right answers did not matter much. It was more important for scientists to set up the participants of the experiment for one or another way of searching for information. The most important thing happened later, at the second stage, when the participants of both groups were offered a certain number of questions (for the purity of the experiment, they were in no way connected with the previous ones and generally belonged to other areas of knowledge). There was no need to answer them. Each participant was only required to assess their ability to answer them in principle – without resorting to any help.
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This is where an interesting thing came to light. The participants in the “Internet group” were much more confident in the vastness of their knowledge than those who had previously had to look for answers in books. What does it say? In all likelihood, psychologists believe that the ease of obtaining information makes us somewhat exaggerate our own knowledge. “If you do not know the answer to any question, you are well aware of this, and also understand that finding the right information may require a certain amount of time and effort. but the presence of the Internet significantly reduces these efforts. And, apparently, it leads to a blurring of the line between our true knowledge and our ideas about them, which, at the same time, are also noticeably overestimated.‘ commented study leader Matthew Fischer to the American Psychological Association’s web portal (2).
Of course, this does not mean that we should immediately scrap computers and start cramming, for example, all the available volumes of the Great Russian Encyclopedia. But it’s definitely worth a more objective assessment of what we ourselves know, and what is known to Google and Yandex.
1. M. Fisher et al. “General Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge”. Online publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology of March 30, 2015.
2. apa.org