Judging Knowledge in the Digital Age: The Role of External‐Memory Organization

Abstract

Two studies examined relations between features of external-memory repositories (personal computers) and confidence in knowing. Participants judged their confidence in knowledge related to their work or studies and then answered questions about the way they store and use information. Participants who maintained more organized repositories were more confident in their knowledge. Furthermore, moderation analyses showed that the participants who navigated through their files by manually clicking through folders to find documents, but not those who use an automated search feature, felt more knowledge confident if they maintained a well-organized electronic repository. These results provide evidence for relation between assessments of internally "stored" knowledge and the degree of organization of their externally stored "knowledge." When technology transforms the scope of human faculty, the distinction between features belonging to oneself and the external environment begs reconsideration. In fact, throughout history, new technologies have extended the scope of basic human faculties in ways that are pervasive-the wheel, for example, extends the scope of our feet, and clothes extend the scope of our skin. The extension of mind by technology-from stone tablets to computers-has occurred so gradually and pervasively that accurate distinctions between internally and externally held knowledge are difficult to make and sometimes seem irrelevant (Hertel, 1993;Ward, 2013).The present investigation examined the relation between confidence in knowing and features of external repositories, in this case personal computers and their memory extensions.Our primary hypothesis was that the degree to which individuals maintain organized external repositories can predict their confidence in knowledge related to their main intellectual enterprise. In essence, we propose that external memory organization operates as a heuristic, similarly to the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). The availability heuristic in judgment and decision-making tasks is a short-cut method of relying on the ease with which a few initial instances come to mind (the ease of accessibility). The unarticulated assumption is something like: If I can easily think of examples of X, X must be true (or more prevalent).Judgments of personal knowledge are also based on retrieval fluency (see Kelley & Lindsay, 1993). For example, Winkielman, Schwarz, and Belli (1998) asked participants to recall either 4 or 12 childhood memories (the easy and difficult conditions) before rating the completeness of their memories representing those childhood years. Despite recalling many fewer memories, the participants in the easy condition gave higher ratings. Retrieval difficulty in the 12-memories JUDGING KNOWLEDGE IN THE DIGITAL AGE 4 condition led participants more frequently to infer that large parts of their childhood memories were missing.The logic of an organization heuristic is similar: When individuals judge personal knowledge, they implicitly assess the ac...

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