Law school taught me lots of things unrelated to the law, but one of the best lessons was that just because you are educated does not mean you actually know what you are doing.
I always knew in the back of my mind this was true but as I am not a psychologist nor am I involved in the social sciences, I had no idea how to prove this other than through my anecdotal experiences, but apparently, these people were smart enough to figure out some method and publish in the Journal of Experimental Psychology – “Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge,” Matthew Fisher, Mariel K. Goddu, and Frank C. Keil from Yale University. http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-0000070.pdf
Now for those of you who prefer the layman’s version of the article I submit the following for your consideration…
I know that you are all tired of hearing from me that the internet is full of lots of ideas and crap because people often do not have the capacity to figure out fact from fiction. Most people think because they can google things that they are smart believe all social media is real – which includes the videos, recordings, and pictures. The problem with the assumption that social media is real relatively stupid as interviews of politicians are generally 45 minutes long but only 3 minutes makes the news and thanks to the applications available today, everyone is now a mix master, editor of the truth, etc.
I think that most people do not comprehend what they are reading or looking at because the internet has made things too easy for people to turn into the girl in the State Farm Commercial 😀 https://youtu.be/v_CgPsGY5Mw.
The other problem I have with lots of internet articles is that they mix fact with horse manure but people buy the crap because it “seems true” or it “seems reasonable.” The problem is that the truth and facts do not have to be reasonable or seem like anything – sometimes the most screwed up and convoluted scenarios are the facts. Unfortunately, for me and some of my friends – the legal standard is based on the ordinary or reasonable person. Seriously, sometimes I do better polling random people on the streets about how I should resolve the situation because most people are impractical, illogical, and/or don’t know what the hell they are doing but because the average person thinks and behaves that way, I am screwed 🙁
What I do know is that educated people do not always equal the most rational or most intelligent or practical as depicted by the administrators from the University of South Wales who decided to build a campus in London to the tune of £319,000 and then have no students on campus to support it. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-33680352