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      Searching for explanations: How the Internet inflates estimates of internal knowledge.

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          Abstract

          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.

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          Author and article information

          Journal
          J Exp Psychol Gen
          Journal of experimental psychology. General
          American Psychological Association (APA)
          1939-2222
          0022-1015
          Jun 2015
          : 144
          : 3
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Department of Psychology, Yale University.
          Article
          2015-13957-001
          10.1037/xge0000070
          25822461
          c21ead56-3dba-4725-9e80-1d22f6386401
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