Online, everyone is an expert. Twitter has become host to hundreds of millions of virologists and epidemiologists. As I write, thousands of new Kazakhstan analysts will no doubt be logging in for duty; every emerging news story creates a new community of strident online commentators. It’s often noted that this happens because social media rewards certainty and strong takes: there’s little appetite online for nuance, and no one’s interested in knowing that you don’t know. A less well-documented and intriguing phenomenon is that simply the way we access information online might be contributing to our intellectual overconfidence and inflated sense of expertise.
In a series of experiments published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Adrian F Ward, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, explored how using Google to answer general knowledge questions affected how people rated their own intelligence. Compared with participants who had to answer a general knowledge quiz without using the internet, those who could google their answers were more likely to agree with statements such as “I am smart” and “I have a better memory than most people”. They were also more likely to overestimate how well they’d do in a quiz if they couldn’t use Google.
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