Paging Dr. Google: 'I do my own research'

Expertise, schmexpertise

Professors and PhD recipients pose after graduation at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2008. -Wikipedia

A Pew survey conducted in December 2021 suggests that Americans’ trust and faith in scientists, experts and other professional groups has declined significantly over the last year alone. Their confidence ratings were highest at the outset of the COVID-19 contagion, but have sunk to below pre-pandemic levels. Why, you might ask?

A patient walks into the examining room and, armed with “information” gleaned from a search engine, rebukes his physician on the wrongness of his diagnosis. Out of frustration — and perhaps comic relief — doctors call this phenomenon “Paging Dr. Google.” Just down the street, a freshman student lectures her professor, who wrote his dissertation on Khrushchev, Gorbachev and the Soviet military, on Russia’s political culture.

These are but two real-life examples of a growing phenomenon that I’ll call a “crisis of confidence in expertise.” You’ve probably noticed this, too. How many times have you encountered people in an online discussion who make a highly questionable assertion. Asked where the information came from, they reply, “I do my own research.”

Typically, they don’t provide a citation. When they do, it’s often a fringe publication whose authority is undercut by fallacious reasoning and partisan language. Moreover, the problem with doing your own research is that doing so is not actual research. There are plenty of cartoons and memes making fun of “doing your own research.” To wit:

-Pinterest

First of all, there is an important semantic distinction to be made. I’ll start with the New Oxford American Dictionary, which defines research as “the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions.” It’s a widely accepted standard. And, of course, scientific research is subject to peer review. In your experience, do people who “do their own research” meet this standard? Not unless they have lots of time on their hands and don’t mind rigorous questioning about their methods and conclusions.

More likely, these armchair “researchers” are skeptical of the conclusions reached by real researchers and are searching for material that confirms their disbelief. This makes them susceptible to all manner of charlatans, as happened most recently during the pandemic when unfounded rumors about vaccines gained currency and surely led to many unnecessary deaths.

Tom Nichols, an academic and national security expert who wrote the aforementioned dissertation on the Soviet Union, has penned a book on the phenomenon entitled “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters.” He explains its thesis in the brief interview below that aired in 2017 on WGBH, Boston’s PBS station.

Nichols characterizes the widespread disregard for expertise as “a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blogsodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen.” In a New York Times review of the book, critic Michiko Kakutani suggested another title: “How ignorance became a virtue” (free link).

And the confidence crisis is worsening. Gallup’s 2023 Honesty and Ethics Poll conducted in December 2023 found that Americans’ trust in establishment professions has decreased to alarming levels and shows no signs of improving.

Since 2019 (just before the pandemic), public trust has continued to decline in 23 professions, including engineers, physicians, lawyers, clergy, police officers, bankers and politicians. Not surprisingly, lowest on the trust totem pole were car salesmen and members of Congress, with journalists not far behind. Though trust in nurses has declined seven points post-pandemic, it remains high at 78%. And veterinarians clocked in at a respectable 65%.

It all adds up to an erosion of trust in our institutions — both public and private. It is certainly true that sometime experts get it wrong. They are, after all, imperfect human beings. But they’re invariably right far more often than not. Still, the rank-and-file do not like being told what to think by the highly educated.

How else, for example, can one explain the widespread loathing of Anthony Fauci, the diminutive elderly physician who became the public face of the Trump administration’s COVID-19 response? Did Fauci commit errors? Did he make misstatements? Of course. But he got it right far more often than his boss Donald Trump, who at one point suggested to his own experts that they consider injecting bleach and inserting ultraviolet lights into the bodies of those infected with the coronavirus. Later, Trump managed to contract the virus himself and was hospitalized for several days after recklessly turning the White House into a COVID hotspot.

Oddly, Fauci’s foes gave Trump a pass on his profoundly ignorant Clorox counsel, while excoriating the high-profile immunologist for his positions — sometimes mistaken — on vaccines and school re-openings.

I have a friend sympathetic to those who do not respect expertise. He sees it as a logical reaction to the falsehoods so common in public life. He thinks this skepticism makes us less susceptible to flimflammery. After all, look how the experts have done so far.

While conceding some of his points, I generally take the opposite view. The consequences of this disdain for expertise and lack of respect for institutions make us more credulous, not less. Indeed, research suggests that “doing your own research” can make you dumber.

Because confirmation bias informs our search terms and their results, our online queries for information on any given topic leave us vulnerable to so-called “fake news.”

“In terms of political consequences, increased belief in misinformation has the potential to increase political cynicism and apathy towards politics, lower trust in reliable media sources, increase polarization [and] motivate political violence,” the author of a University of Central Florida study told Forbes.

In other words, it can cause stuff like this:

A crowd-erected gallows hangs near the United States Capitol during the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol. -Wikipedia

I’m sorry but I don’t have a solution. The genie’s out of the bottle. With “research” so easily conducted on Google, DuckDuckGo and TikTok, you can find material to convince yourself that you’re right about just about any topic.

In the case of Trump supporters, it’s a fulfilling prophesy. As the WGBH host told Nichols, “His victory in 2016 was a rebuttal or repudiation of all the experts who said he couldn’t win.”