TIL: An Illusion Of Knowledge

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...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.

http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-0000070.pdf

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000070