THE ILLUSORY-KNOWLEDGE EFFECT

We report six experiments, involving nearly 1000 subjects, that invest igate people's tendency to indicate ''I knew it all along'' with refer ence to facts that we are sure they would not have recalled without be nefit of study. Subjects studied factual statements before doing a gen eral knowledge test, ''knew-it'' subjects were told to write only the answers they would have recalled without benefit of study, bur they wr ote about 20% too many answers; based on this finding. we would conclu de that people mistake recently learned answers for previous knowledge . However. ''learned-it'' subjects, who were told to write only answer s they learned during the experiment, tended to write the correct numb er; given this finding, we would conclude that people have an excellen t ability to discriminate between the two sources of available answers . The two conclusions can't both be right, Either people have the need ed information in mind, but the knew-it test distracts them from it, o r they don't, but can adopt strategies for the learned-it test that gi ve accurate performance. We conclude it's a bit of both. (C) 1996 Acad emic Press, Inc.