You Are Not So Smart 063 - The Search Effect - Matthew Fisher
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Nov 19, 2015 Matthew Fisher, a fifth-year grad student at Yale’s Cognition and Development Lab, dives into the intriguing effects of our internet usage on perception and memory. He reveals how easy access to search engines can inflate our sense of knowledge, making us believe we know more than we truly do. The discussion extends to collective knowledge and its implications on self-assessment of understanding, highlighting the cognitive biases we face. Fisher also touches on the paradox of social media's influence on stress, particularly among teenagers.
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Search Inflates Perceived Knowledge
- Using search can make people mistakenly include externally stored facts in self-assessments.
- That misattribution inflates their sense of internal knowledge and competence.
Same Content, Different Self-Ratings
- Experimenters compared people who searched online to people who were given identical content.
- Both groups saw the same material but searchers later rated their unrelated knowledge higher.
Search Boosts General Confidence
- After searching, participants rated their ability to answer unrelated domain questions higher than non-searchers.
- The boost generalized across topics, not just the specific items they looked up.