Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research indicates that using the internet in knowledge related tasks increases overestimation. We attempted to replicate this finding and extended previous research by explicitly manipulating the standards that participants used for the explanatory knowledge task in order to reduce the metacognitive bias. We conducted a 2x2 within-subject experiment with N = 166 participants. Replicating previous findings, the results show significantly more overestimation in Internet than in No-Internet conditions. However, with an alignment to external standards participants elicited more accurate metacognitive judgments. We conclude that explicit standards may be an important factor in knowledge-related activities involving the internet because of their effect on metacognitive judgments. On a theoretical level, this has implications for determining the basis of overestimation in knowledge tasks with the internet. On a practical level, providing external standards could be a feasible aid for buffering against this bias, for example in the educational context.