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I suppose it makes sense.  But a new study says that the Internet is making us less quick to say we know things. Sure.  That's because anyone anywhere can look up just about anything to confirm you're right (or wrong). People are less willing to rely on their knowledge and say they know something when they have access to the Internet, suggesting that our connection to the web is affecting how we think, according to newswise.com. Professor Evan F. Risko, of the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, led a recent study where the team asked about 100 participants a series of general-knowledge questions, such as naming the capital of France. Participants indicated if they knew the answer or not. For half of the study, participants had access to the Internet. They had to look up the answer when they responded that they did not know the answer. In the other half of the study, participants did not have access to the Internet. The team found that the...

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...

I don't know whether to be delighted -- scared-- but supposedly your friends know how long you'll  live.  That's according to a new study by Washington University in St. Louis.  Apparently, close friends  may have a better sense of whether you'll live a long life, suggests new research on personality and longevity. “You expect your friends to be inclined to see you in a positive manner, but they also are keen observers of the personality traits that could send you to an early grave,” says Joshua Jackson, PhD, assistant professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences, at newswise.com. The study demonstrates that your personality at an early age (20s) can predict how long you will live across 75 years and that close friends are usually better than you at recognizing these traits. Male participants seen by their friends as more open and conscientious ended up living longer. Female participants whose friends rated them as high on emotional stability and ...

So that explains it.  I never used my hands to gesture during a math lesson. A new study says that kids who do gain a deep understanding of the problems they are taught. Now I understand why I got 400 on my math SAT. Previous studies have found that gestures can help children learn, according to newswise.com. "This study in particular was designed to answer whether abstract gesture can support generalization beyond a particular problem and whether abstract gesture is a more effective teaching tool than concrete action," the Web site notes. “We found that acting gave children a relatively shallow understanding of a novel math concept, whereas gesturing led to deeper and more flexible learning,” explained the study’s lead author, Miriam A. Novack, a PhD student in psychology at the site. R esearchers randomly assigned 90 children to conditions in which they learned using different kinds of physical interaction with the material. In one group, children picked up magnet...