By Makoto Mitsui

8:00 JST, May 10, 2025

Don’t understand something? Look it up yourself.

In school, students are taught that it is important to gather information and think for themselves, rather than just passively learning what is taught. It is true that acquiring knowledge by thinking on one’s own is more likely to result in real learning.

However, in January 2024, a paper published in the journal Nature showed that such “common sense” may have an unexpected negative effect.

A research team from the University of Central Florida and other universities in the United States showed both fake online news items and genuine ones to research participants and asked them to judge the truth or falsity of the stories. In doing so, they created one group of participants who were recommended to look up information through internet searches and another group who were not recommended to do so, and tested the effect of the internet search recommendation.

The results were surprising. The internet search group was 19% more likely to judge fake news to be “correct.”

In the next experiment, all participants first judged the news items to be true or false without the........

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