YouTube tutorials make people sure of their skills

Washington: Watching YouTube videos, Instagram demos, and Facebook tutorials make people feel overconfident about acquiring all sorts of new skills, even if they don’t become experts, a study has found. Researchers from University of Chicago in the US conducted a series of six experiments to find out if watching videos without practising the demonstrated skills actually improve our ability to perform them. In one online experiment, the researchers assigned 1,003 participants to watch a video, read step- by- step instructions, or merely think about performing the “tablecloth trick”, which involves pulling a tablecloth off a table without disturbing the place settings on top. People who watched the 5- second video 20 times were much more confident in their ability to pull off the trick than were those who watched the video once. These results provided initial evidence that repeated viewing may lead people to an inflated sense of competence. To find out whether this perception is borne out by actual performance, researchers tested a group on their dart- throwing abilities. Those who watched a demo video 20 times estimated that they would score more points than those who saw the video only once. The group also predicted that they would be more likely to hit the bull’s- eye and reported that they had learned more technique and improved more after watching the video. — PTI