Searching the internet for information apparently inflates people's opinion of their own intelligence.

A new study published March 30 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found out that people with online access to search engines when researching a topic have a hyped sense of their personal knowledge of the world compared to people that use other tools.

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"It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source," noted Mathew Fisher, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in psychology at Yale University and the lead author of the study.

On the contrary, Fisher added when people are really on their own, they can be widely inaccurate about how much they know.

For the study, Fisher and his team conducted nine different experiments with more than 1,000 participants. The team compared the self-perceived intelligence of people that use the Internet in researching a topic with that of people using non-digital methods in each experiment.

In a particular test, the psychologists asked the question: How does a zip work? A control group was given a website link for the answer while another group was given a print-out with the same information.

The two groups were then asked an unrelated question: Why are cloudy nights warmer? Neither of the group had researched the topic, but the people in the group with internet access were more confident they knew the answer than the analog group, even though they weren't allowed to search the answer online.

The study results showed the cognitive effects of searching the internet for information were so powerful that people still think they're smarter even when their online searches didn't help, said Frank Keil, a psychology professor at Yale University.

The psychologists were also convinced an inflated sense of personal intelligence might be dangerous in the political realm or other areas that involve high-stakes decisions.

In cases involving big decisions, Fisher said it could be important for people to distinguish their own knowledge and to not assume they know something even if they actually don't.