Frequent Google usage to find answers causes inflated sense of intelligence: Study

Are you among those who turn towards Google whenever a question sprouts before you? Well, if this is the case then there also might be a chance of you assuming to be smarter than you already are. These statements are not personal and are backed by research conducted by experts at the University of Texas at Austin. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study says that those who use Google to find answers have an inflated sense of intelligence as they think that the information germinated from their own brain. 

According to a Daily Mail report, study author Adrian Ward said in a release that the boundary between internal and external knowledge fades away when we are constantly connected to a source of information, which sometimes makes us believe that everything we know is internal. Moreover, Ward wrote in his study-

Using Google to answer general knowledge questions artificially inflates peoples' confidence in their own ability to remember and process information and leads to erroneously optimistic predictions regarding how much they will know without the internet.

Was it you or Google?

Another ironic effect of using Google is that the users don't know if the answers they gave were extracted from the search engine or were products of their own intelligence. For this study, the experts asked ten general knowledge questions to the participants and were given the option to either use the search engine or their own knowledge. The experts found that those participants who used the search engine showed higher levels of confidence for the second round of questioning than those who used their brainpower. 

In a second experiment, the experts presented 70 questions before the participants and allowed some of the participants to use the internet for the test. They were given another set of 20 questions but were not allowed to use the search engine. Interestingly, those who took the help of the internet for their answers were far less accurate in determining the source of their knowledge as compared to those who used their knowledge. 

According to the experts, this practice does have some repercussions as an inflated sense of intelligence might lead to poor decision-making and higher exposure to misinformation.

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