The internet has changed the way we do many things, from organising a get-together to looking up a recipe. Tasks that little over a decade ago would have involved dozens of phone calls or a trip to the library, can now be completed in a heartbeat. There has been much animated debate about the potential relative harms or benefits of all this, but convincing evidence has not been forthcoming. Now a new study of 119 men and 83 women recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General has found that after accessing information on the internet, people can experience an illusion of knowledge. Even if the internet hasn’t necessarily changed the way we think, it seems it does have the potential to change our perceptions of what we think we know.

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This new research builds on another internet-related finding that’s been dubbed “The Google Effect”: people are more likely to forget information if they are told it has been saved by a computer. There is however no evidence that in practice this is a bad thing, as we can assume that the cognitive capacity saved by not having to memorise easily accessible information can be put to good use elsewhere. We can never know everything, but we can always increase our analytic abilities. It has even been suggested by the head of the British school exam board OCR, that it is “inevitable” that students will eventually be allowed to use Google in exams, as memorising facts is no longer viewed as an important skill.

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