(Newswire.net — April 1, 2015) — If you don’t know, ask Google. The fast search engines and online databases made people more secure and relaxed when it comes to smartness, a new study showed.
In a study called “Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge,” published in the American Psychological Association Journal of Experimental Psychology, shows that search engines are actually inflating people’s perception of their own knowledge.
In a study, researchers conducted nine different experiments that suggested those who learn something online feel they are smarter than those who learn it through books or via a teacher.
“Searching the Internet for explanatory knowledge creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own personal understanding of the information,” researchers concluded in a study.
Researchers also highlighted that this phenomenon could potentially contribute to the hardening of beliefs that internet searches increase the perception more than opponents do. Therefore, the question is whether the knowledge of ‘where to look’ can be treated as the knowledge itself.
“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,” lead researcher Matthew Fisher of Yale University said to the Telegraph, which first reported on the findings.
“It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source. 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.”
On the other side, however, there are many examples of the ‘advanced’ school courses where students are encouraged to understand how to filter information and where to search, then memorize the data.
In addition, there is a factor of multimedia, which overruns the one-dimension offered by the books. If there is a video or an infographic animation, it is more likely that people will learn much faster about the topic. The learning curve is much steeper with online data than from the books.
Interactivity and multimedia induces faster synapse networking, which we recognize as the long-term memory, it is a fact that people learn much faster on the internet than reading books, however, the opportunity to learn faster is not the same as the knowledge itself, and it never will be. The illusion of being smart just because they can fast access the information and learn is still just an illusion, and the books are still the most reliable source, however dull and incomplete they may seem.