The Dangers of “Do Your Own Research” and “Believe in Science”

During the pandemic, we turned to our leaders for updates on the rapidly worsening, unprecedented situation.

As days turned to weeks, and the sick lined up outside city hospitals, we craved information. But much of it was in the unfamiliar language of virology and immunology, public health and epidemiology.

In those early days, politicians and government officials who’d never heard terms like “cytokine storm” and “RNA virus” were suddenly charged with explaining what was happening. Thankfully, informed voices emerged. Experts regularly held zooms with science journalists, providing technical updates that we used to inform our articles, blog posts, podcasts, and other means of communication.

“Do Your Own Research” Fuels Science Illiteracy

COVID reawakened the mantra DYOR: do your own research. According to AI, it isn’t new:

“The phrase ‘do your own research’ seems ubiquitous these days, often by those who don’t accept ‘mainstream’ science (or news), conspiracy theorists, and many who fashion themselves as independent thinkers. On its face it seems legit. What can be wrong with wanting to seek out information and make up your own mind?’”

But doing “research” by choosing what to read, watch, or listen to, is not at all the same as the research that scientists do. We don’t pay attention only to the data that support our hypotheses – science is more about rejecting hypotheses, thinking more, and devising new experiments to investigate something in nature. Science is about data, not “content.”

Sources credit the origin of DYOR to Milton William “Bill” Cooper who, in the 1990s, was widely described as an “American conspiracy theorist.” Twenty years later, his DYOR fueled the anti-vaccine movement, countering decades of evidence that vaccines work. Fear of vaccines resurfaced in association with QAnon during the pandemic years, and has yet to die down in this post-COVID era.

DYOR taints medical science in other ways.

Sedona Chinn, from the University of Wisconsin and Ariel Hasell, from the University of Michigan, published “Support for ‘doing your own research’ is associated with COVID-19 misperceptions and scientific mistrust” in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review in June 2023. (They aren’t scientists – their expertise is in communicating science.)

Chinn and Hasell analyzed data from a YouGov market survey of U.S. adults given in December 2020 to 1,500 individuals and in March 2021 to another 1,015 people. Participants were asked whether they agreed with three statements about DYOR, rated on a 7-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree, with “neither disagree nor agree” in the middle:

1. “Anyone can be an expert on something if they do enough research.”

2. “I prefer to do my own research rather than rely on experts and intellectuals.”

3. “The opinions of people who have done their own research are just as valid as the opinions of experts and intellectuals.”

The investigators used statistics to demonstrate what we instinctively know, or at least suspect. They conclude that:

1. “People often overestimate their abilities to seek and interpret information and tend to search for information that aligns with preexisting values, beliefs, and identities. Perceptual biases can lead to inaccurate conclusions, particularly when individuals lack topic knowledge, training in scientific methods, or rely on gut feelings.”

2. DYOR may also “promote skepticism of science institutions and mainstream information sources by highlighting how they might mislead the public. These calls may reflect perceptions that science institutions or mainstream news media are corrupt or have a hidden agenda hostile to one’s worldviews and goals. While DYOR messages are not exclusively used to promote misinformation, our results show that DYOR perceptions are associated with distrust of science institutions and COVID-19 misperceptions.” Even well-intentioned DYOR could promote skepticism of official information sources, they added.

3. An alternate use of DYOR may be to support an “anti-establishment political identity,” rather than seeking data, evidence, or information. On the vaccine front, “DYOR is often invoked in conjunction with resentment towards doctors and scientists who dismiss personal experience and intuition … a manifestation of contempt for elites rather than an affirmation of the importance of independent research.”

“Believe in Science” Predates DYOR, But is Even More Damaging

I dislike memes. They can be incorrect about things that aren’t a matter of opinion, yet sound authoritative, especially when they’re copied and pasted like a transposable element (“jumping gene”) flitting across a genome.

A good friend recently posted a particularly irksome one on Facebook:

“Believing facts and trusting science doesn’t mean you’re a ‘liberal.’ It means you’re ‘literate.’”

The disconnect is that “belief” and “trust” are emotions. They have no place in science.

The first response to my friend’s Facebook post mirrors exactly what Chinn and Hasell found:

“Let’s keep in mind that much of *science* is funded by government and special interest groups. Do your own research and so called *fact* checking.”

So this DYORer equates scientific research with research consisting of reading memes. The asterisks around the word “science” suggest derision, that she decides what is and isn’t science according to what she believes. So I responded:

“The NIH and NSF fund basic research, for thousands of scientists. Without basic research, we would have no drugs. My own research was on fruit flies, but led to treatments for leukemias and other conditions. ‘Special interest groups’ are not the enemy. They include the biotech companies that bring us targeted cancer drugs and gene and immunotherapies…”

My husband Larry pointed out that initial government funding led to “invention of microwave ovens, cell phones, hearing aids, satellite communication, email, artificial organs and limbs, and hundreds of other things.”

Memes like this one, especially the incantation of DYOR and “believing in science,” continue to erode respect for what scientists actually do.

“Doing your own research” means selecting what one reads, listens to, and views to support pre-conceived notions. This lacks the creativity, objectivity, and critical thinking that a practicing scientist does when “doing research.”

Science is a Cycle of Inquiry, Testing, Interpreting, and Revising Hypotheses: My Story

DYOR entails absorbing the ideas and thoughts of others, picking and choosing, perhaps, to support what one already thinks is true. Scientific research is a whole other animal.

The first chapters of my textbooks (I’m an oldschool author, not a “content provider”) introduce science as a cycle of inquiry. Scientific research isn’t a series of steps with an endpoint, but more a way of thinking and testing (experiments) that leads to posing new questions, which in turn inspire new experiments to test our hypotheses on ways that we think the natural world may function.

I’m recently retired, and thinking a lot about the role science has played in my life. Thinking like a scientist is like breathing for me, so perhaps that’s why I’m so sensitive to DYOR claims.

I was born a scientist.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve brought home things from nature – rocks, fossils, bones, dead things and live things – and wanted to learn about how they lived, how they survived, how they’d died if they had. I instinctively conducted experiments.

One of my earliest memories is of my mother finding a bright green beetle in a head of lettuce, calling it, with authority, a “lettuce bug.” She handed it over to me. When I tried feeding it different things, one at a time, to see what happened, I was doing an experiment. I made an observation and tried to learn something by changing the conditions and watching what happened. The bug survived for a few weeks before stinking up the box I’d put him or her in.

In college I majored in biology, and worked in a genetics lab, using fruit flies to study the effects of altering diet on reproduction. I can’t remember the details, but the cycle of asking a question, developing an hypothesis and a way to test it, then conducting experiments, drawing conclusions, and asking new questions based on them, etched itself into my brain. To me scientific inquiry was a natural way of thinking, harkening back to the lettuce bug.

After college, I found a wonderful, young researcher who’d just started a genetics lab at Indiana University. Thomas Kaufman was working with homeotic mutations in fruit flies. They had mixed up body parts, Antennapedia with legs where its antennae should be and proboscipedia with misplaced legs and/or antennae where its mouthparts should be.

In the 1980s, I used classical gene mapping to begin to order the homeotic mutations on their chromosome, using an indirect method that took years, and the work of other students. As our lab group grew, we investigated what the homeotic mutants told us about normal development, how complex bodies get their parts in the right places – plants have homeotic mutations too.

Then in the 1990s, after I’d moved on, two post-doctoral researchers in the lab identified and sequenced the part of the homeotic genes that controls where body parts end up as development unfurls. That was the homeobox, or Hox. We have Hox genes too. In fact, right about when the homeobox was discovered, altered expression of one of them was causing my thyroid cancer. Today, Hox genes and the transcription factor proteins that they encode are targets for cancer treatments.

It turned out that the genomes of all vertebrates harbor 39 Hox genes, inherited in four clusters on their chromosomes, that encode proteins that control yet other genes, the cascading effect the emergence of body form. Mutations in 10 Hox genes lie behind conditions in people, ranging from cancers of the blood, breast, pancreas, head and neck, ovary, liver, and bladder, to the rare congenital malformation hand-foot-genital syndrome and the extra and fused digits of synpolydactyly.

A particularly intriguing homeotic condition in people is Liebenberg syndrome. Arms develop as legs.

In 1973 a medical journal described five generations of a South African family whose members had stiff elbows and wrists and short fingers. In another case, identical twins’ fingers resembled toes.

It wasn’t until 2012 that a physician who was an expert in the comparative anatomy of limbs of different animals, Stefan Mundlos, saw a patient who had odd-looking and stiff elbows, and unusual muscles and tendons. Mundlos was perplexed, until an X-ray scan of the patient’s arm fell to the floor. Looking at the anatomy on the image from a different angle, the arm looked more like a leg. The elbows were anatomically knees! The human elbow joint hinges and rotates, but the knee extends the lower leg straight out. That’s exactly what the man’s curious arms did.

CODA

Research in science involves a lot of reading and thinking and testing and observing and hypothesizing and continually revising what we thought we knew. It is ongoing, done over decades.

And that’s why the flippant phrase “do your own research” sets me, and I suspect some others, off. There’s far more to being an expert on something than absorbing already-known information that confirms what a person already knows or believes. The phrase does a disservice to science and scientists.