Episode 20: Who Do You Trust? Part 3: Trusting Experts (And Why We Often Don't)

In this episode, April discusses the importance of experts in society and why it's so hard for some people to trust them. And, as promised, she put lots of articles in the show notes below, because she wants you to trust her.

Episode 20 Show Notes

For science information that's both educational and entertaining, subscribe to Phil Plait's astronomy blog:
https://www.syfy.com/tags/bad-astronomy

Daniel Newman's article about expertise is focused more towards marketing, but still applies:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnewman/2014/04/22/experts-may-have-influence-but-what-makes-an-expert/?sh=6a6f846212c8

Here's the NPR article about Idaho lawmakers calling their public health officials elitists:
https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/politics-government/2020-08-10/idaho-lawmaker-listening-to-experts-is-an-elitist-approach-to-coronavirus-restrictions

A great article from the Christian Science Monitor about our worsening anti-intellectualism and distrust of experts:
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2018/0827/Who-made-you-an-expert-Is-America-s-distrust-of-elites-becoming-more-toxic

Jacques Peretti's excellent discussion of how "elite" became a bad word:
https://qz.com/1237582/how-elite-became-a-bad-word/

Some articles discussing the factors that play a role in whether/how much individuals trust science:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/do-you-trust-science-these-five-factors-play-big-role
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/12/key-findings-about-americans-confidence-in-science-and-their-views-on-scientists-role-in-society/

Gleb Tsipursky's article about distrust in science:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/dis-trust-in-science/

Fascinating paper about anti-intellectualism in America:
https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/zQnndNgGgDkpWwavHMnA/full

Articles about the Dunning Kruger effect and covid conspiracy theories:
https://europepmc.org/article/MED/29966822
https://www.sciencedirect.com/sdfe/pdf/download/eid/1-s2.0-S0277953618303964/first-page-pdf

A really good paper (that I didn't have time to discuss) outlining some ways that public health experts might get more people to trust them:
https://kiej.georgetown.edu/trust-experts-and-covid-19-special-issue/

Maria Baghramian's blog post about expertise:
https://jerichochambers.com/trust-in-experts-why-and-why-not/

Tom Nichols on expertise and why it's important

Transcript

Episode 20: Who do you trust? Part 3: Trusting the experts (and why we often don’t)

Hi everyone. This is the third of three episodes on the topic of trust, and the most difficult one to write. I mean, I had to search through dozens of articles and try to figure out exactly how much information I could share with you without getting too deep into the topic but still giving you ideas that would be helpful to you. Yeah, it was hard, and the show notes for this episode are, well, pretty extensive. So if anything I say in the next minutes gets you curious and thinking, please check out the show notes and take it from there.

So…Part 1 was about interpersonal trust; Part 2 was about skepticism and how it should help us trust in science; and this one, Part 3, is about why we sometimes tend to trust people who don’t have any real expertise on a topic (including ourselves) rather than pay attention to the experts who actually know what they’re talking about. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard or read something like, “I can figure things out for myself, I don’t need an expert to tell me what to do.” And hey, I’m not here to tell you that’s 100% wrong. However, I AM here to tell you that it’s sometimes wrong…Yeah, that’s vague, so let’s get more specific, shall we? Here we go…

Music

Let’s start with the word “expert”—what does it mean? According to the Oxford Language dictionary, an expert is a person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area. Who qualifies as an expert? That is completely dependent on what particular area we are talking about. For instance, let’s take two very different fields—astronomy and air conditioning repair. Someone who would be considered an expert in the field of astronomy would need a terminal degree in astronomy or a closely related subject. One of the most well-known astronomers today is Phil Plait, AKA @badastronomer on Twitter (he’s actually a very fine astronomer who worked on the Hubble Space telescope and at the Goddard Space Flight Center). He’s got a PhD in astronomy from the University of Virginia and over a quarter century of experience working in his field. Yeah, he’s definitely an expert on the topic of astronomy and is the go-to guy on anything astronomical. On the subject of air conditioning repair, however, I actually have no idea how much he knows about it, nor would I call him up and ask him why smoke is pouring out of my AC unit. I would, however, call my AC guy, who has been keeping our air conditioners from exploding in the hot Nevada desert for about 18 years now. I don’t know that he has a degree in anything, although he might, but that’s not what makes him an expert. His knowledge of HVAC units and his many years of working on them is what makes him an expert in his field, and I would pretty much trust anything he said about air conditioners. Astronomy, probably not…

So that seems very cut and dried, but these days it’s far more complicated than that. Analyst and CEO of Broadsuite Media Group, Daniel Newman, wrote in a Forbes article on the topic of expertise that with the huge amount of content being created online on a daily basis, it can be extremely difficult for the average reader to determine which of those content creators is actually an expert in their field and which ones are just, uh, creating content in the hopes of influencing their audience? I mean, anyone with a computer and an internet connection can create the impression that they know what they’re talking about, and people can and do fall victim to so-called “experts” online all the time. So determining who is and who is not an expert is a problem. 

But that’s not the only problem with experts. One of the hallmarks of American society is that we are very individualistic, meaning we are focused first on ourselves as the creators of our own destinies. This self-reliance (which is a good thing by the way) unfortunately also carries with it the idea that we can fix all of our own problems and we don’t need anyone telling us what to do, thank you very much. Alexis de Toqueville, the great 19th century historian and diplomat who came to America to study our way of life, admired American individualism even while he noticed that we also had a large streak of anti-intellectualism. It’s a bit disconcerting to realize that a country that has some of the finest universities that produce some of the greatest minds in the world which has led to amazing scientific, medical and technological discoveries is the same country in which a large percentage of the population believed former President Trump when he said that experts are terrible and he doesn’t need to listen to them. In fact a rather large percentage of the population would rather trust the opinion of their friend or a blogger or their favorite Tik Tok artist on a topic than an expert on that same topic. Yeah, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance going on here. So let’s look at some other reasons besides our national character that might explain why many people hold these opinions about experts:

Music

·      First of all, and I’ve said this a number of times in previous episodes, people in general don’t like to be told information that conflicts with their worldview, especially political and/or religious beliefs—this goes back to upbringing, moral standpoints, even where people live, things like that. Most people are fine with the experts whose opinion they already agree with, but it should come as no surprise that people don’t like to be told they’re wrong, and they often react by slamming the bearer of that unwanted information and dismissing it out of hand. I mean, if you think one way and the majority of experts are telling you something else, is it in your nature to simply assume that you are incorrect and the experts must be right? Yeah, I didn’t think so…

·      Another thing that I found interesting during my research is that some people see themselves as potentially more knowledgeable about a topic than an actual expert—According to DePauw University faculty member Salil Benegal in an article published in the journal Social Science and Medicine, the cognitive bias known as the Dunning Krueger effect plays a role in this. The Dunning Kruger effect is a bias in which someone thinks their knowledge about a topic or their ability to do something is far greater than it is in reality. This can lead to them thinking that they know more, or are better at something, than a person with actual expertise in that area. As an example, some people may have found false or misleading information about covid vaccines on websites that, frankly, no legitimate doctor or scientist would have any reason to visit. Then when they refuse a vaccine and say something to their doctor about how vaccinated people cause unvaccinated people to have health problems and the doctor says, “um, what?” they may think that this doctor doesn’t know very much if they don’t know this piece of information, so they must know more than that doctor. Now, there is no legitimate evidence that says vaccinated people are any kind of threat to unvaccinated people, but does a doctor have time to explain how vaccines work to someone who thinks like that? They might, but they probably don’t. 

·      A third reason is that people often don’t see experts as being honest enough—they think they may have a bias or may be being paid by a corporation to do research, and therefore that research is suspect. And certainly experts, being the humans that they are, do have biases. Experts, however, are more likely to be cognizant of their own biases, at least as they relate to their field of expertise, than the average person, simply due to their education and training. As I mentioned in episode 19 while discussing the scientific method, they do their best to factor those biases out of any research they conduct. As experts, they absolutely have a duty to the public to try to be as correct as they can possibly be; that does not mean that they are always totally correct, sometimes they are wrong. But to then say that they can’t be trusted because they are not always correct is definitely overgeneralizing; plus most experts who find out they were incorrect are only too happy to correct themselves, and let the public know where their ideas fell short. And, yes there are many experts who are associated with or work for corporations, and universities do get grants from corporations to do research. That does not make them or their research findings automatically suspect; although it does make the peer review and replication phases of the scientific method extremely important. It also means that experts should be fans of increased transparency and accountability so the public knows these things; but it doesn’t mean that the information that comes from experts who work at for-profit corporations or have received funding from them should be summarily dismissed. 

·      A fourth reason is that people may associate experts with “elitists” or aligned with elitist viewpoints—that’s the idea that experts look down on regular people and side with a select group of influential individuals who somehow are working against the best interests of those regular people. I’ll post a link to a 2020 Public Radio article that talks about Idaho State lawmakers’ attempts to strip their public health district’s power to close schools during the pandemic. While debating on the issue, one of the state senators said, and I quote, “Listening to experts to set policy is an elitist approach and I’m very fearful of an elitist approach.” He insisted that the public health officials who said they were doing it for the public good (which is frankly their job) were actually taking steps towards totalitarianism. His opinion, however popular it was within his party, was in direct opposition to the majority of Americans who consistently supported measures like school closings and mask mandates at the height of the pandemic.  Jacques Peretti, award winning investigative reporter for the BBC, states that experts and elites were once trusted to the same degree that they are distrusted today. Now, he says, scientists, economists, mathematicians, academics and journalists are all tagged as “elitist” and discounted and demonized by a large percentage of the population. I’ll link to Peretti’s article, that gives a really thorough discussion of why and how this happened.

Music

All this having been said, we frankly need experts. Ashley Landrum, a professor of science communication at Texas Tech University, says that they are essential to our society. According to her, “We do have to operate in a society that has a division of cognitive labor, where we have experts, and we need to rely on one another because we don’t have the time or resources to be experts in everything,” Now of course that’s despite our natural American tendency towards “rugged individualism” and doing it ourselves. Which reminds me of my husband, who is exactly that way. Once, when YouTube had just become a thing, I came home from work and he said to me, “Hey I just watched a hysterectomy operation on YouTube, so if you should ever need one I can totally do it!”. Of course, he was joking, but the idea that anyone can learn everything about anything by watching YouTube has really taken us over. And while we can learn lots of things on the interwebs, it’s just not true that we can know as much or more than experts. We still need people with the background, education, knowledge and years of experience to provide us with real, legitimate information about things that matter to us in our daily lives, as well as helping us to see the big picture. So how can we know who to trust, and equally important, how can experts help us realize that we can trust them? Daniel Newman, who I cited before in this episode, has some good tips about making sure the person who claims expertise on a topic is actually an expert, not just someone with an opinion:

o   Always, always look at the person’s biographical information. If you can’t find any information about their background that establishes them as being someone with credibility on the topic, don’t just take what they say as gospel. Practically any legitimate expert has their credentials on full display somewhere. Google them.

o   Check the information that person is providing. Most well-written articles link to the sources where that person got their information. If someone is making claims but doesn’t really have any evidence to support those claims, don’t simply believe them because they sound good. If you can’t verify that their information is correct, and is from credible, reliable sources, you should be wary of that person and what they are telling you. 

How can experts make themselves more trustworthy? By exemplifying the kinds of traits that we look for when deciding who we can trust in our daily lives…the people around us that we trust the most are people who we think deserve our respect, who we look up to, and who we believe have our best interests in mind. Experts need to be able to show the public that they CAN be trusted. Philosopher Maria Baghramian, who discusses the role of experts in our lives, says, and I quote, “… we trust experts not only because we expect them to be knowledgeably accurate, but also because we think they are honest and have integrity. A feature of that integrity is a willingness to act in our interest or to show goodwill, in other words, we expect the experts’ benevolence. It is this nebulous but essential element that mitigates the risk we take in trusting and justifies the hope and confidence we place in those we trust.”

So people are looking for experts who show by their track record that they are indeed competent and knowledgeable, but more importantly that they are honest, have integrity, and are acting in our best interests. If the public sees them in that way it will be far easier for them to get information out there that will be of benefit to us.

Also, although there are topics and areas of debate in which experts do actually disagree, it’s probably better to put more stock in the words of those who agree with the larger consensus, because as I stated in the last episode, a consensus among experts in a particular field is the outgrowth of lots of research and data, and it isn’t come to lightly. Although an expert may be that “one voice crying in the wilderness” on some topic, even if their opinion is the one you agree most with it’s better to at least recognize that opinion is in the minority and it may end up not being the most accurate one. Behavioral Scientist Glen Tsipursky in a 2018 Scientific American article about distrust in science did point this out by observing, and I quote, “while individual scientists may make mistakes, it is incredibly rarefor the scientific consensus as a whole to be wrong. Scientists get rewarded in money and reputation for finding fault with statements about reality made by other scientists. Thus, for the large majority of them to agree on something—for there to be a scientific consensus—is a clear indicator that whatever they agree on reflects reality accurately.”

Music

You know I honestly think I’ve just scratched the surface of this really important topic, but for those of you who would like to read more about it, I’ve put a lot of good articles in the show notes. Also, this is the last episode of Season 2, and I’m off for a couple of months to travel, recharge, and get ready for my fall semester students. If you want to contact me, to let me know what you think, or you have an idea for an episode, you can find me on Facebook at COMteacherapril (all one word). I’ll be back soon, but in the meantime I hope you use all the information in these episodes to help you Think it Through.