Doubtful Pedantry

Do we perform better in life when we are confident in our assumptions? Are we more likely to believe people who express certainty and is there a correlation between certainty and expertise?

It might be thought that certainty is a prerequisite of expert knowledge. Experts know their stuff and it is upon this foundation that the authority of their opinions is grounded. How otherwise can an expert ever claim to be – or be thought to be – an expert?

But it may not be quite so simple.

In a study undertaken last year by researchers at the Harvard Business School it was found that people are more likely to be persuaded by the opinions of experts who express a degree of uncertainty about their subject. The findings are explained by what the researchers have dubbed “expectancy violations” where people become alerted to unexpected evaluations in both expert and amateur testimonies. In the case of amateur testimony the phenomenon works in reverse: we are more likely to believe the opinions of amateurs when expressed with certainty (since we do not ‘expect’ amateurs to be confident in their knowledge).

There’s no guarantee that this phenomenon applies across the board but it certainly raises some interesting questions - and doubts even - about the assumption that expertise should always be presented authoritatively*.

“The authority of those who teach is very often an impediment to those who desire to learn.” –Cicero

This challenge to common sense assumptions about the value of authority and self-confidence has also been investigated by researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Southern Mississippi who studied the effects of self-talk (I will fix it!). They asked half the participants in their study to write out “I will” 2o times whilst they asked the other half to write “will I” 20 times. They then asked all the participants to work on a series of anagrams. Surprisingly the participants who had been asked to write “will I” solved nearly twice as many anagrams as those who had written “I will”.

Most self-help gurus would tell us that affirmative statements like “I can do it!” are always better than questioning statements like “can I do it?” but it turns out that this little nugget of received wisdom may be completely wrong. Or as Bertrand Russell put it:

"One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."

*Presumably there must come a point though where too frequent an expression of doubt by an expert would begin to erode their professional credibility, so it certainly wouldn’t seem advisable to take this as a licence to express every opinion with uncertainty. The whole point is that such expressions should be unexpected.