Scientists show how ‘doing your own research’ leads to believing conspiracies — This effect arises because of the quality of information churned out by Google’s search engine::Researchers found that people searching misinformation online risk falling into “data voids” that increase belief in conspiracies.
I see a lot of hate against the concept of doing one’s own research on the internet and it really bothers me. The problem is not doing one’s own research. The scientists that wrote this paper also did their own research. All scientists (should) do their own research. That’s inherent to science and that’s part of what got humanity this far. The problem is that some people lack the capabilities to properly assess information sources and draw correct conclusions from them. So these people end up with incorrect beliefs. Of course they could just “trust the experts” instead, but how are they supposed to know which experts to trust if they’re not good at assessing sources of information? Finding those experts is in itself a task that requires you to do your own research.
TL;DR: I think this hate on “doing your own research” is unjustified. People believing nonsense is a problem that is inescapable and inherent to humanity.
Doing your own research being good/bad depends entirely on one’s ability to scrutinize reliable sources. When I “do my own research” it looks like this.
When my brother “does his own research” he presents horrendously false information from terribly bias and debunked sources. He’s the primary family member which influenced my writing that piece on radicalism.
If someone is unable to comprehend/recognize valid from invalid/biased sources/information, “doing their own research” is very dangerous in fueling further extreme/conspiratorial beliefs.
QAnon and covid/anti-masking are great examples in which people “doing their own research” resulted in a lot of unnecessary suffering and stupidity.
People should learn how to effectively scrutinize sources before they attempt to “research” something themselves. “Doing your own research” can be productive or unproductive, and it depends entirely on the individual.
If someone is unable to comprehend/recognize valid from invalid/biased sources/information, “doing their own research” is very dangerous in fueling further extreme/conspiratorial beliefs.
People should learn how to effectively scrutinize sources before they attempt to “research” something themselves.
Okay, but how do I recognise valid from invalid, bias from unbiased?
Take that sketchy blog you linked me to, it’s just some thing some guy wrote. Can that be trusted? Must I spend significant free time to do in-depth research on all of his references to ascertain if he’s valid and unbiased? How will I know if the sources are valid and unbiased? Will I have to do in-depth research on all of their references too? When does it end?
At some point you just have to trust someone, you can’t unravel the complete truths of anything to their very core. Most of us don’t even have the free time to unravel things more than a little bit.
I see the point you’re making and don’t entirely disagree, critical thinking is something that’s taught and learned, and it’s what makes the difference here. But this idea that we can ever actually know that what we’re reading is reliable or unbiased? I don’t buy it.
I think it’s impossible to actually know if a source is reliable without directly confirming its assertions with your own eyeballs.
And, I think it’s impossible to actually know if a source is endeavouring to actually be unbiased, or if they have an agenda or plan, without literally reading the minds of those involved to ascertain their motives and potential schemes.
At the end of the day, people who place their bets on one side of the fence or the other when it comes to who to trust aren’t so different. Critical thinking and the ability to ask questions constantly and never take anything you hear as truth just on the face of things is what’s most important, I think. That way, you’re at least a little more prepared to spot lies when they crop up.
I guess that’s my point, haha.
Unfortunately after coming to this realisation I don’t know who to trust any more :-( Obviously I can’t trust the media, they’re owned by the rich ruling class and even when they report truths, they do so via a thick veil of bias that makes it difficult to know if I’m getting all the facts, or if I’m missing out on huge important chunks of information entirely.
Take all the reporting on our recent UK strikes, all the reporting was there, but it was all about how disruptive and terrible the strikes were for everyone else, painting a picture of selfish, greedy workers making things worse for everyone else because they only care about themselves. The whole article would barely if at all mention in any depth why they’re striking, why they felt they had no other choice, how this is a symptom of a larger problem with late stage capitalism, etc.
The media is owned by the rich, obviously they’re going to paint the picture they want. And that news source I’m talking about isn’t even privately owned, it’s our tax funded government news organisation.
The government itself is also owned by the rich, our PM is just a few million short of being a literal billionaire, he’s a business capitalist. They can’t be trusted either. They all have their own agendas and reasons to skew facts and trick people.
Take Brexit as a well known example of both private interests AND the government itself tricking millions of people with lies and deception and exploitation to make an absolutely terrible decision that damaged this country irreparably. Everything people saw on TV, websites, social media, newspapers, radio, leaflets, etc, was chock full of disinformation, emotional trickery, etc.
Even the people saying Brexit was a bad idea had their own agendas and clear bias, and while I side with them, can I truly, honestly say that what they said is unbias and definitely reliable with no hidden ulterior motives? Alas, no.
So where do I get my reliable, unbias information even if I have my critical thinking hat on? I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t believe anything, not fully, unless I see it with my own eyes. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING that comes to me through other channels is twisted along the way by bias and agendas.
I’m not happy about it, it makes me very sad :-( But yeah, that’s kinda where I’m at these days.
I totally get where you’re coming from in regard to the importance of critical thinking and media bias/government influence.
As for my blog, the references section is how how I affirm it’s valid information. I used scholarly sources or reputable publications, like Psychology today, and only linked to media sources when it was pertaining to the current radicalism in our politics over here in the US.
But even then, I personally use independent media fact checkers on the media institutions I cited. Cross-checking what those articles state is pretty easy, and having multiple unbiased/less biased sources corroborating reporting is a decent indication it is accurate.
But as you said, recognizing the validity of citations is a learned skill. Speaking personally, this was a skill I developed academically. I often encourage people to take a critical thinking course at a local community college and I believe that should be mandatory curriculum in high school/secondary school.
That certainly provided me with a buffer to the misinformation and radicalism that I’ve seen grip and corrupt so many people I know/knew.
And our knowledge is not unlimited, new theories have to be done in a constant evolving way. The sheer arrogance of medical doctors towards rare diseases and the resulting ignorance to acknowledge their existence with treatment refusal is what leads people out not only to alternative, but specifically questionable medicine as well.
The “don’t do your own research” - crowd believes more into misprints than a self-researched identical copy of the original document. They place incredibly high authority into printed information as if it was done by higher beings immune to mistakes. Including misunderstanding the concept many definitions in social sciences like law are inherently socially constructed and therefore unable to be the end to everything.
Sending everyone off to Google is a terrible discussion culture and should be moderated away. Many of my searches end in a self referential loop.
“Do your own research” is a phrase with a lot of baggage. It means more than doing your own research.
It’s a phrase that has been used online in debates over every kind of conspiracy theory, religious idea, or political stance and carries with it the unsaid presumption that alternative sources are the key to learning the “actual truth.” It’s a loaded phrase that acts as a calling card for people who are overly confident that they have the right answer but can’t articulate how they arrived at it.
I roll my eyes whenever I read or hear someone say “do your own research” because I know the debate ends there and there’s no convincing them otherwise.
Thank you for commenting. I am also bothered by this and defended “doing your own research” many times over the last few years. There are many possible pitfalls when you go seeking information but I believe you should not criticize a person for trying.
I hear you. Didn’t really know there was such a pushback.
Just to add to what you’ve said, specifically about how scientists also do their own research … scientists do a lot more than “their own research” (which in this case is reading the literature out there of others’ findings and thoughts).
These include:
- perform their own experiments to test their own ideas and prove them correct.
- attend conferences of many scientists where ideas and findings are presented to everyone and open to comment/critique from everyone
- communicate their thoughts or findings only once it has passed quality checks from reviewers and editors
- have their whole career motivation based on getting published (through the above checks), discovering the actual truth and convincing the world of that truth.
- generally treat all findings and thoughts with scepticism but with a view for finding the flaw and using that to disprove the finding or prove something new and better.
- culturally value (to a fault) being intelligent, insightful and understanding as much as possible including an opponent’s findings and arguments.
Ie, science is very much about the stuff other than “doing your own research/reading” and that stuff, which is all dedicated to getting to the truth of matters, is arguably what makes good science go.
Fund your libraries, and use them. Librarians (the ones with Masters degrees) are trained to teach you that. Contact the State organizations that oversee that certification to make sure it doesn’t go away in the name of lowering salary costs (i.e., your taxes).
Exactly, the problem isn’t people doing their own research. The problem is also a system (search engines) that doesn’t actually provide quality results.
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Of course they could just “trust the experts” instead, but how are they supposed to know which experts to trust if they’re not good at assessing sources of information?
Effort would (IMO) be better spent on showing them how to figure out whether a secondary source is trustworthy than having them try to dissect scientific papers or other primary research materials with an extremely limited understanding of how to do so.
Most laypeople do not have the skills or desire to become good interpreters of scientific, law, technical, or other jargon-laden documents. Some people do not have the mental capacity required to even read raw Clinton staffer email leaks without coming up with shit like Pizzagate.
It doesn’t help that WikiLeaks added editorial titles to the emails that bore little to no connection to what was actually written. People literally just read the titles, saw that an email was there, and believed it.
I think it was also indexed, so people started doing things similar to what they’re talking about in the article which is basically…they’d use the search engine with some bad search criteria and pretend it proved whatever point it was they were trying to make, even if in context it was completely orthogonal to what they were talking about but just matched via keyword.
I encountered a few of those in the wild at the time…either on Reddit or Twitter (or perhaps both?). They’d send you a query string link and pretend that it was proof someone was a demon or something.
Nahhhhh, I researched this… You think it’s just a coincidence that this is also what the liberal media would want us to think?!?
Bro i researched your comment and guess what? FALSE.
Dude, I’m literally not allowed to tell you how many black op raids I’ve led. Watch out, I’ve got the super record for super crazy wild military killer super guys,
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Also, the people “doing their own research” often aren’t intelligent enough to know what is real versus what is made-up garbage, and are gullible enough to believe whatever they happen to read.
Whatever they read that reaffirms their biases, especially.
Kind of a bummer that they’re talking about the phrase “do your own research” and misinformation, but didn’t include the paper specifically about the phrase “do your own research”.
Doing your own research isn’t the problem, it’s how you go about it that is, some will just believe whatever bs static gets put infont of them without understanding the data, how it was collected, etc. and some will blatantly cherry pick to feed their own bias.
Yeah, it’s not an inherently bad thing.
A big part of the problem is that people run to journals without understanding their purpose; publication is just the first step in peer review.
And then when people do a ctrl+f to search for a “gotcha,” they also eliminate all of the nuance and caveats that really explain the potential finding.
Title makes no sense. Researchers did “their own research”. Experts and non experts do “their own research”. Simply there are people who knows how to do it and to draw meaningful conclusions from sources and data, and people who don’t.
when someone sees an article online about an “engineered famine” due to COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccines, and conducts an unsophisticated search based on those keywords, they may find articles that reaffirm their bias.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Confirmation bias is real.
Google’s IPO literally ruined the entire society. Don’t be evil!™
SEO and Ai have been very heavy influincers in the degradation of journalistic integrity and reporting facts *while dumbing things down for clicks.
It led directly to a more radicalized and less informed public.
The vast majority of people think that the first answer on Google is still correct. That simply isn’t true anymore because people started to game the system and Google let them do it to gain a shitloat of ad money.
It’s disgusting that they don’t have the morals to rein things in.
I remember a time when “doing their own research” was just “read”… Yes I read, please stop shaming me for it…
While conventional wisdom holds that researching the veracity of fake news would reduce belief in misinformation, a study published on Wednesday in Nature has found that using online search engines to vet conspiracies can actually increase the chance that someone will believe it. The researchers point to a known problem in search called “data voids.” Sometimes, there’s not a lot of high-quality information to counter misleading headlines or surrounding fringe theories. So, when someone sees an article online about an “engineered famine” due to COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccines, and conducts an unsophisticated search based on those keywords, they may find articles that reaffirm their bias.
This is interesting and something I hadn’t really thought about before. The Internet’s conspiracy circles are becoming a giant, weapons-grade “gish gallop”. The difference is that nobody is even arguing with the original conspiracy theorist so nobody even gets a chance to counter any of the arguments until they’ve become mainstream enough for those wishing to counter to be made aware of them.
A lot of those data voids are the result of the academic publishing industry too.
Excellent point.
There’s another thing I hadn’t thought much about, but did see a bit during COVID lockdowns. People would stumble upon some paper published by whomever that was on a seemingly reputable domain, and without knowing anything about the subject claim that it proved things it didn’t and then reference those papers as proof.
Then they’d post on their own blog(s) run up some SEO, and boom, you got the beginning of a rabbit hole.
That’s what they want you to believe. I did my own research and it turns out you are wrong. Checkmate atheist /s
so instead we only trust the knowledge clerics?
What could go wrong with that?
Yes.
I blame social media more than Google. Looking at you, Elon.
Twitter users choose to stay there.
“I have no choice, I have no other options” lol I can hear it in my sleep
Twitter was shit before musk bought it.
Sure, agreed, but what’s his plan to fix this? Where’s the progress? I see plenty of Qanon and bigots (and whatever you don’t like) stinking up the place.
The issue with Twitter is people who think they’ve got a platform to speak loudly. When you have a platform like that, it’s inherently going to be shit, no matter who runs it.
Partly agree, but, like, anybody acting with a modicum of seriousness could do better. Of course it will never be perfect, or even great, but improvement is possible.
I know it won’t fix the problem, but I highly recommend using less biased search engines like DuckDuckGo
