People mistake the internet’s knowledge for their own
Open accessAbstract
Significance: In the current digital age, people are constantly connected to online information. The present research provides evidence that on-demand access to external information, enabled by the internet and search engines like Google, blurs the boundaries between internal and external knowledge, causing people to believe they could—or did—remember what they actually just found. Using Google to answer general knowledge questions artificially inflates peoples’ confidence in their own ability to remember and process information and leads to erroneously optimistic predictions regarding how much they will know without the internet. When information is at our fingertips, we may mistakenly believe that it originated from inside our heads.
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The emergence of IOED in digital contexts is more likely driven by knowledge misattribution rather than by the presentation of numerous snippets.
“Importantly, they demonstrate a similar effect in an interface fundamentally different from search engines, suggesting that the emergence of IOED in digital contexts is more likely driven by knowledge misattribution (Fisher & Oppenheimer, 2021;Ward, 2021) rather than by the presentation of numerous snippets (Eliseev & Marsh, 2023).”
From Overconfidence without Understanding: AI Explanations Increase the Illusion of Explanatory Depth (2025) · cites this paper as Ward, 2021
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How Artificial Intelligence Constrains the Human Experience
Valenzuela, A., Puntoni, S., Hoffman, D., Castelo, N., De Freitas, J., Dietvorst, B., Hildebrand, C., Huh, Y. E., Meyer, R., Sweeney, M. E., et al. (2024) · Journal of the Association for Consumer Research · doi:10.1086/730709 · Cited by 81 · see citing works
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Overconfidence without Understanding: AI Explanations Increase the Illusion of Explanatory Depth
Aslanov, I., Felmer, P., & Guerra, E. (2025) · doi:10.31234/osf.io/8psgf_v1
- Authors
- Ward, A. F.
- Affiliations
- The University of Texas at Austin (US)
- Corresponding author
- Ward, Adrian F.
- ORCID
- Ward, Adrian F.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2021-10-22
- Volume
- 118
- Issue
- 43
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC8612631
- OpenAlex
- W3207200409
- Cited by
- 82
- References
- 7
- Citations by year
- 2026: 24 · 2025: 19 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 1
- FWCI
- 8.11
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory Processes and Influences
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Educational Strategies and Epistemologies
- Keywords
- overconfidence, online search, Google, memory confidence, external knowledge, self-knowledge, metacognition
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Cognition, Cues, Female, Humans, Male, Memory, Models, Psychological, Mental Recall, Self Concept, Knowledge, Internet, Search Engine
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