Are You Really Smart, or Is It Just Google? – GovExec.com

The ability to quickly find the answer to just about any question changes how people perceive their own intelligence, research finds.

People lose sight of where their memory ends and where the internet begins, the findings indicate.

When were constantly connected to knowledge, the boundaries between internal and external knowledge begin to blur and fade, says Adrian Ward, assistant professor of marketing in the University of Texas at Austins McCombs School of Business. We mistake the internets knowledge for our own.

When thinking with Googleor using the internet to fill in gaps in ones ownknowledgepeople believe theyresmarterand have a better memory than others, and incorrectly predict that theyll perform better on future knowledge tests that they take without internet access.

WhatS Me and WhatS Google?

Although humans have long relied on external knowledge stored in books and other people, online search has made the interface between internal thought andexternal informationswifter and more seamless, muddying the waters.

The process of searching Google is also much like searching your own memory, he adds. That can cause people to confuse information found online with information in their own heads.

Ward set out to investigate this possibility by running several experiments. In the first, participants answered 10 general knowledge questions either on their own or using online search. Then, they reported how confident they were in their ability to find information using external sources, as well as in their own ability to remember information.

Unsurprisingly, participants who used Google answered more questions correctly and were more confident in their ability to access external knowledge. More strikingly, they were also more confident in their own memory.

In a second experiment, participants answered the same 10 general knowledge questions either on their own or using online search. Then, Ward told them they would take a second knowledge test without using any outside sources, and he asked them to predict how many questions they would answer correctly.

Those who completed the first knowledge test with Google thought they would know significantly more when forced to rely on their own memory in the futuresuggesting they attributed their initial performance to their own knowledge, not to the fact they were using Google.

A subsequent experiment offers an explanation for this effect. In that study, participants answered knowledge questions on their own, using Google, or with a version of Google that delayed search results by 25 seconds. Unlike those who used standard Google, participants who used slow Google were not more confident in their internal knowledge and did not predict higher performance on future tests, suggesting search speed is partially responsible for knowledge misattributions.

In a final experiment, Ward asked participants to answer 50 questions using either Google or Wikipedia. Although both tools provided the same answers to all questions, Wikipedia contains additional contextual information that may help people recall that the answers originated online.

Participants were then shown 70 questions (50 from before and 20 new ones) and were asked whether each had been answered using internal knowledge or the internet, or whether it was new. Those who used Google were far less accurate in identifying the source of informationspecifically, they were more likely to attribute online information to themselves than those who used Wikipedia were.

Were seeing that people even forget that they googled a question, Ward says.

Less Smart But Feeing Smarter

The research offers a cautionary tale. It suggests that in a world in which searching online is often faster than using our memory, we may ironically know less but think we know more.

This could affect decision-making, Ward says. Feeling more knowledgeable just because youve used the internet might cause you to rely on intuition when making medical decisions or risky financial decisions, and it could make you even more entrenched in your views of science and politics.

Ward adds that the research also has major implications for education, as students might devote less time and energy to gaining knowledge if they already feel knowledgeable. More broadly, educators and policymakers may want to reconsider what it means to be educatedperhaps putting less priority on memorizing facts that can just be googled. Maybe we can use our limited cognitive resources in a more effective and efficient way, Ward says.

For now, Ward says hes scaled back somewhat on googling since conducting the study. Instead, when hes looking for information, he often tries to test his own memory.

When we immediately jump to Google, we dont do the remembering, Ward says. Were not exercising those muscles.

The study appears in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: Deborah Lynn Blumberg forUT Austin

Original StudyDOI: 10.1073/pnas.2105061118

This article was originally published inFuturity. Edits have been made to this republication. It has been republished under theAttribution 4.0 International license.

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Are You Really Smart, or Is It Just Google? - GovExec.com