Does Googling Perpetuate the Dunning-Kruger Effect?

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Is Google causing us to lose sight of where our own knowledge ends, and the internet’s knowledge begins? This question is addressed in a new study by Adrian Ward of the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. His recent paper, “People Mistake the Internet’s Knowledge for Their Own,” was published on October 26, 2021, in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS.

Ward found that Googling can muddy the waters between what people actually know and what they think they know. This three-pronged study found that when people use search engines, they often mistake Google’s knowledge for their own and become overconfident about knowing more than they would know without internet access. “When information is at our fingertips, we may mistakenly believe that it originated from inside our heads,” he writes.

Google May Cause Us to Think We Know More When We Know Less

Ward adds, “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 thinking with Google, people believe they’re smarter and have a better memory than others."

Based on his research findings, Ward speculates that it might be wise for educators and policymakers to reconsider what it means to be educated and for schools to put less emphasis on having students memorize facts that can easily be Googled. “Maybe we can use our limited cognitive resources in a more effective and efficient way,” he said.

Smartphones make it possible for us to hold infinite amounts of knowledge in the palm of our hands. Anecdotally, I agree with Ward’s theory that having Google and other search engines at our fingertips could make memorizing knowledge obsolete in the burgeoning digital age. That said, he also warns that “in a world in which searching online is often faster than accessing our memory, we may ironically know less but think we know more.”

Humble Googling Fits My Alma Mater’s Motto: “To Know Is Not Enough”

Non Satis Scire (to know is not enough) is the motto of my alma mater, Hampshire College, one of the few accredited academic institutions with no tests or grades. Hampshire students design their own curriculum, and the school’s pedagogy doesn’t promote rote memorization or cramming for exams.

I attended college from 1984-1988, long before we had the internet or search engines at our fingertips. But the advent of knowledge-expanding tools like Google fits my educational mindset, which has always been more about nourishing fluid intelligence and connecting the dots between seemingly unrelated ideas than striving for a 4.0 GPA. (See “Flourishing in Life Does Not Require Straight A’s.”)

One of the unforeseen perks of going to a school that puts a premium on lifelong curiosity over memorizing crystallized knowledge is that I’m hardwired to acknowledge my lack of encyclopedic knowledge openly. Some people humblebrag about their wisdom; as a Hampshire College alum, I humble Google and don’t pretend to know more than I know.

In some ways, being taught that memorizing a lot of facts doesn’t necessarily make you smart is an antidote for the Dunning-Kruger effect. When there’s no shame associated with not knowing something, there isn’t any need to over-inflate how much you think you know after looking up answers online. This unassuming worldview is underscored by the fundamental belief that “to know is not enough.”

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What Is the Dunning-Kruger Effect? And How to Curtail It

In their 1999 paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” David Dunning and Justin Kruger first presented what we now refer to as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The gist of this cognitive bias theory is that unknowledgeable people can become overconfident in their cerebral capacity or IQ because they don’t know enough to know what they don’t know. The double whammy of incompetence combined with thinking you’re smarter than you are can lead to poor decision-making and often prevents someone experiencing the Dunning-Kruger effect from realizing their shortcomings.

As William Ian Miller explains in Humiliation, “It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense.”

Simply knowing that Googling can lead to overconfidence in one’s own perceived knowledge might offset Google’s potential to perpetuate the Dunning-Kruger effect. The realization that people who use search engines are prone to mistake the internet’s knowledge for their own is the first step towards being cognizant that each of us probably knows less than we think we know after every Google search.

Now that you have Ward's latest (2021) evidence-based research in your noggin, instead of being overconfident the next time you’re Googling something, it’s probably wiser to repeat after every internet search: “I know less than I think I know." And to remind yourself that not knowing is OK because “to know is not enough.”