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In this episode, we look at how the internet makes us think we are smarter than we actually are.  Get excited, because this is Tiny Leaps, Big Changes.

Welcome to another episode of Tiny Leaps, Big Changes where I share research-backed strategies you can use, to get more out of your life. My name is Gregg Clunis.

The Research:

Matthew Fisher, Mariel K. Goddu, and Frank C. Keil published a paper in 2015 titled,  "Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge”.

What They Found:

The researchers indicated that, “A growing body of theoretical and empirical work suggests that transactive memory systems can be technological as well as social. Though these systems are typically thought to be composed of human minds, our reliance on technology, like the Internet, may form a system bearing many similarities to knowledge dependencies in the social world. The Internet is the largest repository of human knowledge and makes vast amounts of interconnected information easily available to human minds. People quickly become accustomed to outsourcing cognitive tasks to the Internet. They remember where to find information and rely on the Internet to store the actual information. This evidence suggests that the Internet can become a part of transactive memory; people rely on information they know they can find online and thus track external memory (who knows the answer), but do not retain internal memory (the actual answer)”.

The researchers found that “searching for answers online leads to an illusion such that externally accessible information is conflated with knowledge “in the head”. This holds true even when controlling for time, content, and search autonomy during the task. Furthermore, participants who used the Internet to access explanations expected to have increased brain activity, corresponding to higher quality explanations while answering unrelated questions. The results of these experiments suggest that searching the Internet may cause a systematic failure to recognize the extent to which we rely on outsourced knowledge. Searching for explanations on the Internet inflates self-assessed knowledge in unrelated domains. Our results provide further evidence for the growing body of research suggesting that the Internet may function as a transactive memory partner”.

Key Takeaways:

• We are outsourcing our responsibility to memorize things to technology.
• Instead of memorizing, we are knowing where to access the information.
• The knowledge we have access to isn’t our knowledge.
• Transactive memory can be a valuable way to store information.
• Recognize the individuals who have domain knowledge on the topic.
• Having access to knowledge allows our species to grow.

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Reading: Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge (apa.org)