Google can make you think you're smarter than you actually are, study shows

All that Google searching might be giving you a big head.

Simon Oxenham at BPS Research Digest summarized a study from the Journal of Experimental Psychology that found that after accessing information on the Internet, people might actually be overconfident about what they think they know.

Yale University's Matthew Fisher led a team of researchers conducting a study with 119 men and 83 women from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a web service for individuals and businesses to offer work or request workers for tasks

They asked a group of participants to use the Internet to answer questions such as “Why are there more women than men?” and “Why are there dimples on a golf ball?” In the control group, participants were asked to answer those questions without help from the Internet. The researchers then asked all participants how confident they were in answering questions, without the Internet, about six different topics: weather, science, American history, food, health treatments and the human body. Read more...