Internet Blurs Line Between What We Know and What We THINK We Know
Who knew? When I filled in friends on "free-range" parenting after researching it on the Web, I actually thought I was smarter than I really was. This, according to a new study , which has found that searching the Internet for information may make people feel smarter than they actually are, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. "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," said lead researcher Matthew Fisher, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in psychology at Yale University. "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." Scary. But it turns out that we're not just imagining ourselves as geniuses on the subjects we rese...