Browsing the internet can make you feel smarter

Searching the internet for information may make people feel smarter than they actually are, but this inflated sense of personal knowledge may have negative effects, scientists say.

"The internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world's knowledge at your fingertips," said lead researcher Matthew Fisher, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in psychology at Yale University.

"It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source. When people are truly on their own, they may be wildly inaccurate about how much they know and how dependent they are on the internet," Fisher said.

In a series of experiments, participants who searched for information on the internet believed they were more knowledgeable than a control group about topics unrelated to the online searches.

Participants had an inflated sense of their own knowledge after searching the internet even when they couldn't find the information they were looking for.

After conducting internet searches, participants also believed their brains were more active than the control group did.

The cognitive effects of "being in search mode" on the internet may be so powerful that people still feel smarter even when their online searches reveal nothing, said study co-author Frank Keil, a psychology professor at Yale.