Don't Do Your Own Research
By Owen Isenhart on 6/6/2026
To an extent.
This is a common trap I see people fall into, and I feel it can be very damaging to a person's psyche. Whenever there's some hot issue that everyone's forming narratives and conclusions about, you'll hear people give their opinion, and then when asked to justify it, respond with "you gotta do your own research." Generally, when this is said, it's a disingenuous cover for someone to be able to spout whatever they want and not have to back it up under the guise of some secret knowledge they've "researched" and thus cannot explain to the person because they just wouldn't understand because they haven't been privy to the same information as you.
However, for new, breaking issues, I would say that actually doing the research and forming your own opinions can be the better option than just following whatever your favorite influencer says. This is not always the case, as often early data can be messy and propaganda can be rampant, but generally, I'd say it's fair. Where this breaks down, though, is when the same logic is applied to well known, highly researched, and often (but not always) scientific areas. The reason for this is that you simply can't know everything. At some level, you have to put some amount of trust into the institutions that research things and put out information. Trusting them doesn't mean assuming they are infallible, but rather recognizing that a peer-reviewed consensus is statistically a safer bet than our own guesswork. People saying to completely reject them and do the research yourself just leads to a breakdown in necessary institutional trust.
It's a lot easier to do the research on breaking news to form your opinions because you don't have to compile research papers, think super critically, and be proficient in that area. These are usually fast-moving situations where you just need to gather the available facts, perform some level of introspection to find where you morally stand on the situation, and make a well-informed value judgment.
Someone who works a full-time job, has other grown-up responsibilities, has hobbies they like to do outside of work, and gets enough sleep cannot reasonably be expected to become an expert in every field and form all of their own opinions on literally everything. There is no reason for any normal person to be researching the complex epidemiological models of vaccine efficacy to try to figure out if they should get their booster shot or not. Especially because they likely would never get to that point, because the first Google search they'd made would be looking to see if someone's made an article that confirms their gut beliefs that they can just read to make themselves feel good.
The actual research that people need to do in these scenarios is to research the people. Understand the people's backgrounds, credibility, motives, etc., for the information they put out. While evaluating a person's credibility has its own biases, it is a scalable skill we use every day in real life. People can't reasonably be expected to understand all the technical aspects of the information, but they can be reasonably expected to judge the track record and motives of a person who claims to be an expert in that field and evaluate if their information is worth listening to.