Relying on External Information Sources When Answering Knowledge Questions in Web Surveys

Knowledge questions frequently are used in survey research to measure respondents’ topic-related cognitive ability and memory. However, in self-administered surveys, respondents can search external sources for additional information to answer a knowledge question correctly. In this case, the knowledge question measures accessible and procedural memory. Depending on what the knowledge question aims at, the validity of this measure is limited. Thus, in this study, we conducted three experiments using a web survey to investigate the effects of task difficulty, respondents’ ability, and respondents’ motivation on the likelihood of searching external sources for additional information as a form of over-optimizing response behavior when answering knowledge questions. We found that the respondents who are highly educated and more interested in a survey are more likely to invest additional efforts to answer knowledge questions correctly. Most importantly, our data showed that for these respondents, a more difficult question design further increases the likelihood of over-optimizing response behavior.