Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge

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.