Having all of human knowledge readily available on the internet has convinced people that they know a lot more than they actually do, according to a recent Yale study. For their recently published report in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, a pair of psychologists conducted multiple 1000-participant experiments. They found that participants who used the internet to research a subject were more likely to think that they also knew about a second, unrelated topic. Basically, if you look up subject A with the internet, you’re more likely than offline researchers to think you also know about subject B — even if you haven’t actually looked anything up. In general, internet users believed themselves to be brighter and more clever than the other participants in the study.
via Yale Study: You’re not as clever as your Googling suggests.
