Five Research Habits to Abandon in Non-Researchland
If you want to be an effective public expert, stop doing things that seem bizarre to non-experts.
What’s the biggest fear many researchers have about becoming public experts? That being effective with non-experts will require them to give up being an expert—to abandon essential qualities and values that make them a research-based expert in the first place. To be understood by non-experts, goes this thinking, they’ll have to cut corners, be sensationalistic, stray epistemically outside their comfort zones, and dumb down—all of which will reduce if not destroy their credibility with their fellow experts.
The good news: None of these horrible things are necessary to become a public expert.
The uncomfortable news: To be effective as a public expert, you do have to set aside five expert habits—not always, but whenever you inhabit your public role. These habits might seem at first fundamental to research expertise, but they are actually just customs that are specific (I almost said “peculiar”) to research culture. As such, they don’t translate well to other cultures—for instance, every time you the researcher cross the bridge into Non-Researchland.
Look at it this way: If you always ate with a fork and knife at home but a knife looked bizarre or even hostile in the country to which you had just traveled (and which instead used spoons), you would probably pretty quickly learn to use a spoon at dinner instead of insisting on a knife…if you wanted to be understood by your hosts as having come in peace, that is, rather than to insist on your superior knife-wielding ways.
Another metaphor: As an expert, you’re a superhero. But you wouldn’t always wear superhero tights in public. (No, I don’t think you would.)
The Five Non-Translatable Expert Customs
Enough metaphors. The five non-translatable expert customs are:
Only thinking about “doing content” when it’s time to promote your new papers or reports.
Insisting on multiple (three or more) authors/bylines for public content.
Mistaking research gaps for public knowledge gaps.
Expecting non-researchers to be on research’s wavelength and timeline.
Fear of repeating yourself.
Let’s run through each of these.
Only doing content for the public when you want to promote new research means you’ve given away your access to the audiences and communities you want to reach. Instead, you’re dependent on gatekeepers saying yes to your out-of-the-blue pitch—and, should you get that yes, dependent on increasingly fickle algorithms of social media to amplify your messages.
The better play is to gather your audiences around your thinking by publishing content frequently and regularly on platforms that give you immediate access to the communities you want to reach and allow them to have immediate dialogue with you. Email is one such durable platform. Twitch or LinkedIn are others.
The more bylines, the weaker a piece of public content seems. Three or more bylines signal to the non-research world that water follows is watered-down and group-written, as interesting as a letter to the editor. The world listens to individuals, not institutions. So put the content in your voice, thread it with your stories, sharpen it with your hard-won expert perspective, and fire it with a call-to-action that reflects your passion to make things better. Limit yourself to a single co-author with whom
No one outside of research cares about whether your new study fills a research gap. The only gap they might care about is the one between a problem they face and a solution for it—a gap you can fill with your expertise-based framing, insight or solution.
Very few non-experts think like scientists and researchers. You change your mind based on new data, which might appear frequently, episodically or not at all. Very few other people are wired like this. We watched countless public health experts during the pandemic pivot their messaging on a dime when new evidence emerged, without much more explanation than “that’s how science works.” Within science, yes. Within society, not so much. The process of science and research for any question—and the evolving or steady state of evidence on any question—must today be translated and contextualized to make sense to the non-expert. Do not assume the validity of the process and the weight of the literature with these communities.
In the real world, repetition is important. As I wrote recently, repetition is important “when working to get something across to actual people instead of conforming to a guild or cultural norm….Most concepts infiltrate very slowly. Marketing science shows that, unless people are repeatedly exposed to a new concept or product, they won’t even acknowledge it.” In research, you find something and then move on to filling the next gap. When in Non-Researchland, you keep talking about your insight until you’ve broken through.
Being a public expert is a role you assume when you want to bridge the gap between your expertise and the public’s needs. It’s a role rooted in your expertise but not wholly subsumed in it—it has dimensions outside that of the identity of expert that it requires for full success. If you want that success—if you want to bridge that gap—you have to wear the right clothes, use the spoon and never, ever bring a knife to dinner.