Harder Than You Think: How Outside Assistance Leads to Overconfidence

Abstract

Cognitive ability consists not only of one’s internal competence but also of the augmentation offered by the outside world. How much of our cognitive success is due to our own abilities, and how much is due to external support? Can we accurately draw that distinction? Here, we explored when and why people are unaware of their reliance on outside assistance. Across eight experiments ( N = 2,440 participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk), people showed improved metacognitive calibration when assistance occurred after a delay or required active choice. Furthermore, these findings apply across a wide range of cognitive tasks, including semantic memory (Experiments 1a and 1b), episodic memory (Experiments 2a and 2b), and problem solving (Experiments 3a–3d). These experiments offer important insights into how we understand our own abilities when we rely on outside help.

The Cognitive Architecture of Digital Externalization

“…The authors consider this result as evidence for metacognition extending beyond the brain and into external memory stores (Stone & Storm, 2021). Similarly, Flanagin and Lew (2023) found that people overestimate their task performance if web-based information is available (see also Fisher & Oppenheimer, 2021). Another series of studies suggests that thinking about trivia questions before searching for the answers online improves later recall than immediately searching the Internet (Giebl et al, 2022).…”

Seeking versus receiving help: How children integrate suggestions in memory decisions

“…In contrast, when help is always provided children may be less encouraged to self‐reflect about the quality of their knowledge since the help is available regardless of whether it is needed. Indeed, research in adults demonstrates that actively choosing when to seek help, as opposed to always being provided help, decreases over‐confidence during memory judgments (Fisher & Oppenheimer, 2021). In addition, research in children demonstrates that 5‐ to 6‐year‐olds can improve their metacognitive skills under contexts that scaffold self‐reflection (e.g., when provided with feedback; van Loon & Roebers, 2020), suggesting the children can flexibly enhance their metacognitive ability as a function of experimental contexts.…”

The Influence of Feeling-of-Knowing on Metacognitive Processes in the Digital Media Environment

“…One line of research to emerge from such studies shows that the coupling of the human mind with digital devices can result in a conflation between internal and external knowledge – people erroneously believe they possess, in their own heads, information from the web (Fisher & Oppenheimer, 2021a). Moreover, ostensibly because people conflate/misattribute the source of knowledge, they think more highly of themselves after searching the web than after not searching the web.…”