Approach: To explore this question, I designed and conducted 4 online between-subjects experiments. Each experiment compared people who searched the internet for answers to questions (like why are there leap years?) and people who were given the same answers to read. 

Key result: People who searched the internet for explanations were more confident in their ability to explain the answers to questions they googled than people who were simply given the same explanations. Despite this boost in confidence, people who searched the internet did not produce more accurate explanations than people who did not search the internet. These findings suggest that searching the internet can lead people to overestimate how well they have learned information they find online. [Published article in Applied Cognitive Psychology] 

Approach: To investigate this question, I designed and conducted 2 online between-subjects experiments comparing memory predictions and memory test performance between people who looked up translations of Swahili vocabulary words using an online translator and those who studied the same translations but did not look them up themselves. 

Key result: People who looked up the translations themselves were less confident in their learning and tended to remember fewer translations on the memory test than people who were simply given the translations to study. This is one of the first studies to demonstrate that online searching does not always inflate people's confidence. 

Approach: To answer this question, I designed and conducted 2 online experiments (one between-subjects and one within-subjects) comparing people's confidence in their knowledge of GRE words after actively solving a word search puzzle versus passively viewing a pre-solved word search. I used JavaScript to embed interactive word searches into a Qualtrics survey. 

Key result: People who actively searched for a target word to solve a word search puzzle were less confident in their knowledge of the word's definition than people who passively viewed the same pre-solved word search. This suggests that the act of searching itself does not explain why searching the internet for answers inflates people's confidence (see Research Project #1).