Article 1: Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge
The study shows the effect that the internet has on cognition. The study shows how searching the internet for explanatory knowledge creates the illusion that one knows a lot or that they have recall for a lot of information when this is not the case. The study has the backing of nine experiments that show that searching the internet for information leads to high self-assessed knowledge. Individual believe their brains to be more active than they are as is depicted by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). The study arose from the observation that people use transactive memory systems. People unconsciously divide cognitive labor. People are expected to remember things that are related to their area of expertise. The internet has, however, removed the burden of having to recall information on any particular area since it is an expert in all areas. The transactive memory system, in this case, is one-way since the internet never has to make inquiries to individual about information (Fisher, Goddu, & Keil 2). The study was, therefore, motivated by curiosity on how the human internet transactive memory system affects cognition.
The hypothesis under study is whether searching for knowledge on the internet creates the illusion that information that is accessible externally is conflated with information that one has in the head. The study is concerned with the variable at play rather than the differences in how the cognition of different people is affected by searching the internet for information. The dependent variable in the study is self-assessed knowledge, and the independent variable is the internet.
The study used experiments as the research method following a between-subjects design. The variables under observation are the search f information on the internet and self-assessed knowledge. Data was collected by studying fMRIs of participants. Data was collected from nine separate experiments each with a different set and number of participants. Some of the experiments had an equal number of males and females while others differed, but the subject of sex was no important to the experiments. Participants completed the study through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (Fisher, Goddu, & Keil 2). One set of participants was asked to answer a set of questions while searching the internet for answers while the other was asked to answer questions without the aid of the internet. Those who failed to follow these instructions were disqualified from the experiment. The experiment use trivial questions such as asking the participants to give an explanation of how to work a zipper.
The experiment confirms that the use of the Internet does create the illusion of knowledge. Participants who looked up the answers to the questions in the experiment rated themselves as being able to give significantly better explanations than those who did not use the internet. The first experiment failed to establish whether the use of the internet by the participants was either inflating or deflating self-assessed knowledge from a baseline. Subsequent experiments were conducted to test whether self-assessed knowledge was rising from a baseline. The experiments confirm the hypothesis that the use of the internet inflates knowledge from a baseline. The conclusion from the nine experiments lead to the conclusion that the use of the internet to search for information increases self-assessed knowledge (Fisher, Goddu, & Keil 3).
Article 2: Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement
The background of this study is the observation that people believe that the best way to coup with anxiety that precedes the performance of a task is to calm down. The study offers an alternative way of dealing with pre-task anxiety besides trying to calm down. The alternative that the study offers is reappraising anxiety as excitement. The study shows that individuals who reappraise anxiety as excitement perform tasks better than those who try to calm down. The study investigates the performance of individuals across different tasks and fields such as math test performance, singing in an audition, public speaking and so on. Some of the strategies used in the reappraisal of anxiety include self-talk such as saying to oneself “I am excited” out loud. The use of such strategies helps one create an opportunity mindset, as opposed to a threat mindset hence the better performance of tasks. The study shows the importance of arousal congruency during the process of reappraisal (Brooks 11).
The study tests the hypothesis that the reappraisal of anxiety as excitement leads to better performance of tasks. The study advances the theoretical work that already exists in the area of anxiety and emotion regulation. Previous studies have examined how interpersonal statements affect emotions, but there is no work done on how self-statements do; therefore, the study comes in to fill this gap. The main concern of the study is the difference in the performance of tasks among people who try to calm down prior to the performance of a task ad those who reappraise anxiety as excitement.
The study used the survey approach to conduct the study. Three hundred participants were asked to answer questions derived from two different scenarios created by the researchers (Brooks 3). Participants were, for example, asked what advice they would give to coworkers depending on the scenario presented. The data collected was then analyzed by two different raters since the questionnaires contained both open-ended and multiple choice questions. The questionnaires were intended to statistics on what people believe to be the best way to handle anxiety between reappraisal of anxiety as excitement and trying to calm down. The results got from these questionnaires revealed that most people believe that trying to calm down is the best to deal with pre-task anxiety. The researchers then went ahead and used the experiment design to collect data on whether the appraisal of anxiety as excitement helps improve the performance of tasks. The experiments conducted involved singing, public speaking performance, and math performance. Each experiment was conducted independently with different sets and sizes of participants.
The results of the experiments confirmed the hypothesis that the reappraisal of anxiety as excitement through simple processes such as self-statement can help improve the performance of tasks (Brooks 3). Reappraisal of anxiety as excitement helps the individual to form an opportunity mindset, and this helps improve the performance of tasks. Previous studies conducted in this field show that negative affective states result in the formation of threat mindset that leads to poor performance of tasks. This study shows the timing of reappraising one’s internal state and reappraising the situation matters. Reappraising the situation first puts one at the risk of evaluating the situation as a threat, and this negatively affects one’s performance. It is, therefore, important that one conducts the reappraisal of the internal state first in order to form an opportunity mindset that improves the performance of tasks
Work cited
Brooks, A. W. (2014). Get excited: Reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1144.
Fisher, Matthew, Mariel K. Goddu, and Frank C. Keil. "Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge." (2015).
