What the Well-Read Amateurs Know
You’re learning. Maybe you’re reading lots of blogs. Some articles. Books. And after all of this, you’re starting to see the same research studies and terms being used and repeated, over and over. You know about the Asch studies on conformity. The Stanford prison experiment. The marshmallow test. You’ve seen a lot of the same cognitive biases, over and over. Over and over.
So that’s where a lot of well-read amateurs are. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect: “an illusory superiority that comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability.”
You don’t know what you don’t know. It’s easy for a well-read amateur, a weekend warrior, to be unaware of their blindspots for many reasons: first, most people compare themselves to people who know less than they do. This is called a “downward social comparison,” and it’s a great way to make yourself feel better. Without using an objective measuring stick, it’s easy to fall into complacency.
So, by this point, you feel very smart and well-read. Here’s the thing: you’re not. Our blindspots are HUGE.
How You Can Know Little, Despite Seeing the Same Studies Over and Over
There are a million reasons why a study or entire area of research could be in that unknown white area. A lot of our blindspots exist because of the way that scientific information tends to spread to the general public, which is very similar to the way that cultural items—movies, music, books—become hits.
On its own, a single study will get published in a journal, like the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, or Psychological Science. If a study is vibrant, related to something in the news, or particularly interesting, psychology writers might help spread it out into the universe.
Eventually, you start getting a “superstar” effect, where it’s everywhere. This is the marshmallow study, your Stanford prison experiment, your Asch conformity studies: they’re the Taylor Swift of psychology experiments. Because you know so many of these and keep seeing them everywhere, you feel fine filling in your square even more. What don’t you see? All of the scientific knowledge, studies, and information that was never written about in the media at all.
Some of this wasn’t published as a study: researchers collect tons of unused data. Labs, funding, timelines, deadlines—all of these things are immensely complicated, and lots of information can get lost in the process.
Perhaps a researcher tried an experiment several times, but didn’t get a statistically significant result. Sometimes a study gets published in an obscure journal or doesn’t get picked up. Even if it’s a great study that links to a new, intriguing line of thought, you might never hear about it.
We know from the world of music that there’s no direct correlation between popularity and quality—but the idea that “it must not be that good if I haven’t heard about it” is all too prevalent. Why certain studies get picked up and become popular boil down to the same factors that influence our decisions on a daily basis: the whims of daily events and the opinions of tastemakers.
HOW YOU CAN MINIMIZE BLINDSPOTS
If you’re doing research or want to learn about a new topic, I recommend learning about things in a systematic, deliberate way in order to minimize your blindspots. Learning requires building a good framework for the area you want to learn about, recognizing patterns, and maintaining a sense of intellectual humility: owning the fact that we all have blindspots.
- Read very basic texts in the area you’re researching: intro books are your friend. Get an overview.
- Find a syllabus for a class in the more specialized subdivision that you’re interested in. Try a well-known university and a few less-known ones. Read.
- Know your living sources. Get intimately acquainted with Google Scholar, which lets you see how many times a paper has been cited and how influential it is.
- Get over your fear of going straight to the source. Identify key peer-reviewed journals in the area that keep popping up. Go there. Read. Sign up for email alerts when new articles are published.
- Review articles and journals are a great way to read about trends from the past few years and theories that link current studies.
- Identify key researchers in this area. Sign up for alerts on Google Scholar to find out when they publish new articles.
- Test yourself! Write blog posts and papers. Take quizzes. Reading alone doesn’t mean that you’ll retain all of the information.
- Things really are complicated. If you find yourself saying “now you’re just complicating things,” back up—that’s a sign you’re missing enough context to understand why something is important.
- Stay interested in learning for the sake of learning, rather than learning in order to back up a hunch or idea.
- Just because multiple people agree says nothing about how accurate those beliefs are. Science progresses one funeral at a time.
