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.
So as I see it, there are two actual problems that cause the general perception of doing your own research being bad (which is an astonishingly anti intellectual position / cultural meme).
Popular search engines are hot garbage as they are highly incentivized in numerous ways to promote spectacular nonsense of all kinds which at this point are basically just ‘genres of content’.
An astounding number of people seemingly have no ability to do critical thinking, nor do they know what proper research entails. Basically, this is because education in general is on the decline: Public education no longer has (and in many areas never did) the funding or mindset to teach people /how to think/, and with ever more expensive secondary education from ever lower quality colleges, less people understand /how to do proper research/.
Finally, I will point out the insufferable fury I have toward boomers, the generation that told me as a child that wikipedia could not be used as a source, not even wikipedia’s sources as a valid source because the internet is full of nonsense… and then the vast majority of them aged and wisened to believe anything some delusional crackpot posts on a racist facebook meme group, or wacky new age cult / mlm / support group.
My feeling on the issue is that for a lot of people this sort of thinking is just not needed, at least not on the level to do actual academic research. I don’t think its inherent to who they are but just a reflection of the skills they have needed to develop throughout their lives. There is no pressure to develop a rigorous scrutiny of information if there is no consequences to getting the wrong answer. They can survive and thrive well without it. None of their peers are checking them. They might even do better without those skills, more resources to use developing the skills that matter to their lives.
A person who pursues stem as a career has something to lose if they get the wrong answer. Or other areas like journalism ect, I don’t want to imply its only stem people.
just my 2c
I agree. The vast majority of our society at this point believe in thousands of relatively, objectively factually false things, in all realms of thinking.
There is a lot of psychological and sociological research on why this happens, and basically it boils down to most people have built a significant amount of their own idea of themselves, their personality around things which if shown to be incorrect would cause them massive cognitive dissonance, so they often ignore it or explain it as fine with basically rhetorical bullshit.
The other main element is that many, many curious people who want to learn are either misled by fraudsters and con artists when they are ignorant and do not have the background knowledge to critically asses what they are being told, and the most common and agreed upon thing: Research and Education take time and money that people do not have.
There is a reason why, historically, after calamities lead to social collapse, you often get either an explosion of cults and superstition, or just a general lack of written records, indicating that practically everyone was too busy working or migrating to do anything intellectual.