Now almost everyone can find out the answer to almost any question in a few seconds thanks to
According to the results of a recent marketingresearch by the McCombs School of Business, because of the search engines, people began to misjudge the level of their knowledge. Moreover, when they use Google to answer a question, they mistakenly believe that they can handle that question without the help of a search engine. All expert findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Adrian Ward, Principal Investigator and Associate ProfessorDepartment of Marketing at the McCombs School of Business, conducted several experiments to find out whether people were able to confuse information from the Internet with information in their heads. To do this, participants first had to answer 10 general questions on their own or using Google. They then said how confident they were in their ability to find information from other sources and remember it. The subjects who Googled everything answered many questions correctly and were more confident in both their retrieval skills and their memory than the others.
In the second experiment, humans did againthe same as in the first. The scientist then asked how many questions they thought they would be able to answer correctly on their own in the next test. People who used Google were confident that they would answer more questions based on their memory alone. That is, they believed that the successful passing of the first test was related not to contacting Google, but to their own knowledge.
Next, the participants again answered variousquestions. But they were given two versions of Google to help them: one gave the answer immediately, and the second – delayed for 25 seconds. And in this case, people who received a slow search engine were no longer as confident in their own knowledge and did not predict a large number of correct answers as in the previous experiment.
After that, all participants answered 50 questionsusing Google or Wikipedia. They were then shown 70 questions (including 50 old and 20 new) and asked to remember whether they were new or old (and if old, how they answered them: on their own or through a search engine). Those who used Google were less accurate in identifying the source of information (they were more likely to attribute online knowledge to themselves). It turns out that they even forgot that they entered the query into Google.
So why do we forget that we google?Ward notes: Internet searches are faster than accessing our memory. This means that we can only create the illusion of awareness: when we immediately go to Google, we do not remember information and do not train our memory.
Source: Phys.org