Haben Menschen die Möglichkeit online zu suchen, dann schätzen sie Ihr Wissen besser ein als es eigentlich ist.

Searching Online May Make You Think You’re Smarter Than You Are vom 2015-04-02:

Searching for answers online gives people an inflated sense of their own knowledge, according to a study. It makes people think they know more than they actually do.

Und:

People who had been allowed to search online tended to rate their knowledge higher than people who answered without any outside sources.

Das hat Konsequenzen:

If we can’t accurately judge what we know, then who’s to say whether any of the decisions we make are well-informed?

“People are unlikely to be able to explain their own shortcomings,” says Fisher. “People aren’t aware of the quality of explanation or the quality of arguments they can produce, and they don’t realize it until they encounter the gaps.”

The more we rely on the Internet, Fisher says, the harder it will be to draw a line between where our knowledge ends and the web begins. And unlike poring through books or debating peers, asking the Internet is unique because it’s so effortless.

Wenn man sein Wissen falsch einschätzt, weil man durch die Nutzung von Suchmaschinen und Webseiten den Eindruck hat, man wüßte mehr, dann trifft man möglicherweise ungute oder falsche Entscheidungen. Zugang zu Informationen zu haben ist etwas anderes als zu wissen.

(Andererseits scheint der Mensch sowieso viel aus dem »Bauchgefühl« zu entscheiden und sich nicht immer von Fakten und Logik leiten zu lassen.)

Die Studie von Matthew Fisher, Mariel K. Goddu und Frank C. Keil: Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge, 2015.

As the Internet has become a nearly ubiquitous resource for acquiring knowledge about the world, questions have arisen about its potential effects on cognition. Here we show that 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.

Artikel entdeckt durch einen Retweet von André Lampe.