At least that was the conclusion in a paper published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology entitled Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge.
The paper's pretty cool, but for the tl;dr crowd, the abstract explains,
"searching the Internet for explanatory knowledge creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own personal understanding of the information"and the paper concludes with,
"Erroneously situating external knowledge within their own heads, people may unwittingly exaggerate how much intellectual work they can do in situations where they are truly on their own."Makes me wonder what I only think I understand.
Posts
