http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/04/ ... k-it-does/The Internet doesn’t make you smarter; you only think it does
After using search engines, people overestimate their ability to explain ideas.
Original study:
Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge.
http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLan ... xge0000070
From the abstract:
"Searching the Internet for explanatory knowledge creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own personal understanding of the information. Evidence from 9 experiments shows that searching for information online leads to an increase in self-assessed knowledge as people mistakenly think they have more knowledge “in the head,” even seeing their own brains as more active as depicted by functional MRI (fMRI) images."