New Delhi: So you think you are smarter with that Internet-enabled smartphone and know the answers to all the questions from currencies to capitals to cats? A latest study is here to prove you just wrong. Instant and online access to information makes you only 'feel' smarter than you actually are.
A new study by Yale University's Matthew Fisher has revealed that falling back on the information available on the Web might be inflating people's sense of their own intelligence.
Fisher said,"when people are truly on their own, they may be wildly inaccurate about how much they know and how dependent they are on the Internet," a CBS News report noted.
As part of the study, hundreds of people were engaged into a series of experiments in which they were divided into groups and asked to answer random questions such as "How does a zipper work?" One group allowed to search out the answer on the Internet, while the other was not.
People of the group which was provided with Internet access believed that they were smarter about topics unrelated to their online searches, compared to people in a 'control' group who didn't use the Internet in the experiment. The same group also chose the 'smarter-looking', more active brain images as being their own brains from the samples provided.
Even those who were unable to find the information in the first go and continued searching on the Internet had an inflated sense of their intelligence. Fisher said that having such inflated sense of knowledge could be especially dangerous in politics or in other areas where important decisions need to be made.
The study was published online March 31 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
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