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The problem is not doubting the knowledge of the expert; rather, it is discarding it completely in favor of individual experience and perspective.
When the first cases of COVID-19 began to occur at the end of last year in Wuhan, China, and contingency measures began to be implemented, no one imagined that the emergency regulations would be extended so much. In previous articles, we have discussed different psychological and social impacts that the pandemic is causing, such as stress and anxiety, as well as ways to cope with various aspects of isolation and responsibly navigating so that we take care of our emotional health.
In this context, one of the most critical concerns that the pandemic has triggered is a growing lack of confidence in science and experts. The democratization of content can be a positive thing when one is seeking to learn or develop himself in some established discipline. However, it can have dangerous implications if the goal is to be informed about a situation with a high level of uncertainty, such as the progress of efforts to arrest the pandemic.
The web contains a wealth of information about the pandemic and the measures to protect us from it. However, in many cases, the content is contradictory, polarized, or comes from unreliable sources. All of the above has provoked confusion and mistrust of the information available about the pandemic and the people behind it.
This pattern has existed since 2016, with the coming to power of several right-wing leaders like Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Public opinion had been moving toward questioning and depreciating the social and political elites. Both leaders built their campaigns by presenting themselves as the spokesmen for a social minority deceived by the established social and political powers. They cut their paths to the presidencies of their respective countries by sowing seeds of mistrust that extended beyond the dominant political and social classes, reaching academia.
Tom Nichols, the author of the book, “The Death of Expertise,” explains why not only distrust but the discrediting of established knowledge and those who communicate it is a high-risk social setback in a post-COVID-19 world.
According to Nichols, the real problem is more complex than merely not trusting scientific discourse. When that happens, one could seek other sources that corroborate the discourse that does not convince us, in the same way, that one would seek a second opinion when wanting to confirm a medical diagnosis. However, that is not what has been happening. For a significant portion of the general public, it is not a question of being convinced of the veracity of the information received. Instead, they think that the way they seek, process, and learn from the information they obtain on their own is equal or more truthful than what the real experts provide.
“I wrote the book because the general public began to lecture experts in the fields that they dominate. This is something we see even more now.”
The academician and author published his book in 2017, long before the chaos of communication and misinformation that is consequent of the pandemic. The essay on which the book is based is even older, dating back to 2014. In his text, Nichols mentions the idea of gatekeepers in their purest form and without the negative connotations that they carry today.
Areas such as popular culture and the arena of social justice have used the term to refer to people who regulate access to hobbies and shared interest groups. That meaning has gained much traction over the past decade. However, before that, in academia, gatekeepers were the ones who had a high level of knowledge in a given discipline of study. This level of expertise allowed them to be moderators in the conversation and validators of any new information that arose within their epistemological field.
Nichols expressed, more than once, his faith that an environmental crisis such as climate change or a health emergency, such as the pandemic, would help those who advocate for the democratization of knowledge make peace with those who produce it, but it didn’t happen.
“I didn’t consider that there would be a complete political and media infrastructure with a serious interest in not helping the public get out of a state of ignorance.”
Nichols explained that his assumption that society would unite to move in one direction and that systems of governmental power and the media would help them in this advance turned out to be naive. “I didn’t consider that there would be a complete political and media infrastructure with a serious interest in not helping the public out of a state of ignorance,” he said. “Individualism incentivized by these structures became more important than facts.”
How do we resolve a problem of misinformation like this in times of pandemic? The first step would be to understand that this is not a problem of misinformation, but rather one of cognition. If we are rooted in the idea that our personal research on the web carries more weight than the work of scientists and physicians who are experts in their field, it will not matter how many or which sources we use, because we would look for those that confirmed this fallacy.
The next step would be to understand that science is not a switch that will quiet our concerns and provide us a quick solution. The work of scientists is to study the situation, generate hypotheses about how to resolve the problem and test them until finding one that works. Uncertainty, trial, error, and success are part of their day-to-day lives.
It is the uncertainty that motivates us to investigate on our own and arrive at our conclusions. It is crucial to bear in mind that these conclusions may bring us peace of mind in believing that we understand and perhaps have some control over a particular situation distressing us (such as the pandemic). However, this knowledge is not as comprehensive as that of people who have dedicated their careers to years of study in disciplines such as medicine, virology, and health protocols.
Distinguishing the difference between our experiences and the opinions we form as a result versus the verifiable facts obtained through scientific research could not only help us have a more solid basis for processing the current landscape but also help us make informed and intelligent decisions that play an essential role in combating the pandemic.
Disclaimer: This is an opinion article. The viewpoints expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and official policies of Tecnológico de Monterrey.
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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