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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Oct 15, 2025

Evidence-based Knowledge Synthesis and Hypothesis Validation: Navigating Biomedical Knowledge Bases via Explainable AI and Agentic Systems

Evidence-based Knowledge Synthesis and Hypothesis Validation: Navigating Biomedical Knowledge Bases via Explainable AI and Agentic Systems

Published on: June 13, 2025

People mistake the internet's knowledge for their own.

Adrian F Ward¹

¹McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78705 adrian.ward@mccombs.utexas.edu.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

|October 23, 2021

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

People often confuse internet information with their own knowledge. Using Google for answers can lead to overconfidence in personal memory and thinking abilities, even when offline.

Keywords:

attribution cognition knowledge memory

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Human-Computer Interaction
Information Science

Background:

Humans increasingly rely on the internet for information retrieval.
Distinguishing between internal and external knowledge is crucial for accurate self-assessment.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether people can accurately differentiate between their own knowledge and internet-sourced information.
To examine the impact of internet search on self-perceived cognitive abilities and future knowledge prediction.

Main Methods:

Eight experiments involving 1,917 participants.
Participants used Google to answer general knowledge questions.
Assessed confidence in internal knowledge, thinking, and memory recall.

Main Results:

Participants using Google were more confident in their ability to access external information.
Internet search led to overconfidence in personal thinking and memory abilities.
Users erroneously predicted greater future knowledge without internet assistance.

Conclusions:

The seamless interface of online search blurs the lines between internal and external knowledge.
Overreliance on the internet can lead to a misattribution of external information to personal cognition.
This misattribution results in inflated self-confidence and potentially impaired independent knowledge recall.