I like to think of myself as a freethinking individual. I like to look at big problems and use my experience and my noggin to come up with possible unique solutions. And I find I keep running into the same response to my ideas, which is the question, “Do you have any research to support that?”
I hear this question a LOT. It seems reasonable enough, but there is something about it that bothers me, and it’s not just that I don’t have any research. It’s that I am not hearing any other responses, such as “What the hell are you talking about?” and “Justin, you’re nuts.”
So, using this “empirical data,” my “research” shows a pernicious trend: that many people automatically defer to research processes, putting it ahead of their own cognitive ability.
I get the feeling that, while they are willing to doubt me if I have have no research, they are also set to blindly accept my idea if I do have it. If I don’t have research, then my thoughts have no merit in their eyes, but if I do, it’s as though the research has become their God, at least of intellectual discourse.
The trouble with this kneejerk deference to research is, there are a great many concepts that just can’t be demonstrated or proven via the standard research process. Here are a few rhetorical questions to illustrate my point: Do you love your mother? If your answer is yes, well, do you have any research to support that? Do you believe the meek will inherit the earth? If the answer is yes, you have any research to support that? Do you believe, as the founding fathers did, that we all have a self evident inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? If yes, do you have any research to support that? (If research is essential to all arguments, and we have no supporting research, then we’ve got to give the whole country back to England.)
Research science has done wonderful things for humanity. At the same time, there’s an awful lot of research that hasn’t really enlightened us all that much, and has often misled us. Research is only as good as the person interpreting it. It is not infallible.
At the risk of piling on, if you wanna get really picky, there is no such thing as truly scientific research. The only way research can be truly scientific is if we randomly select what we do research on. Since that is rarely the case, all research studies are skewed because they represent research on things that somebody somewhere wanted to spend the money to do research on. There’s a massive subset of things that nobody wants to spend money to do research on, on which there is no research. I hope you won’t ask me if I have any research to support that, I think it’s obvious. And by the way, you’ll notice that scientists never say that a research project has “proven” anything. They always hedged their bets by saying “research shows . . .”
But the big thing that hit me today is a bit of “research bias” that no one ever talks about, and that is, research scientists get paid to do research, and universities make huge money doing it as well. So of course they are going to emphasize its importance, and that becomes a cultural attitude.
Again, I understand that research is a wonderful thing, and double-blind studies and statistical analysis often yield fantastic information. But because people who do this research are dependent upon more contracts to do more research, they themselves are biased, as are the people funding the research. It’s a business like any other, and they are eager to convince anyone and everyone that their product is something that everyone should buy. But research is just a process, and therefore it is essentially a machine. By itself it cannot think, nor can it feel, nor does it have experience or wisdom. It is one path of discovery, but it is not the only one.
And no, I don’t have any research to support that.
