Trust is everything
I don’t remember the specific moment when I learned that the earth goes around the sun, but I do remember a phase of general fascination with the solar system, sparked by watching the Apollo moon landings, and rushing off to the local library to devour book after book on the topic. It’s likely I learned it somewhere during that period.  

​For the ‘Central Dogma’, in contrast, I have a very vivid and specific memory of the moment I learned this. Four decades later I can still see and hear my secondary school biology teacher telling us as if it was yesterday. It seemed important, not just to pass my exams but to understand the fundamentals of how our cells work, so it clicked into place in my memory right away.
 
The point here is that we don’t know in the true sense of the word. We trust. I trusted the library books, especially when they all said broadly the same thing, and I trusted my parents and teachers who backed that up. Years later doing my ‘A’-levels, I even understood the gravitational forces to explain planetary orbits. Yet I have never demonstrated this experimentally, nor would I even know where to start doing so. I just trusted the people and the books I learned from and I’ve had no serious reason to question it ever since.
 
And similarly for the flow of genetic information. Although I learned some of the supporting evidence, I have never done these experiments myself. I’ve seen the concept challenged a couple of times, learning about reverse transcriptase as an undergraduate, and about prions as a PhD student, but apart from these exceptions, all my subsequent understanding of molecular and cell biology fits the ‘Central Dogma’. The research in our own laboratory today, and in many others, would be impossible if it were wrong. But I have never tested it directly. I just trusted the teacher and never questioned it further. It explains what I see and acts as a good basis for experiments.

Alternative facts
Here’s the problem with this approach. Flat earthers, creationists and anti-vaxxers also trust the person who told them these ‘alternative facts’! So what makes us different? Like us, they constantly have experiences that support their beliefs - others who say the same thing or people who react badly to a COVID vaccination, for example. They explain away anything that conflicts with their belief (science, in other words!) just as we explain away their beliefs saying “they are crackpots”. But are they? Or are they doing the same thing we do – trusting what they have been told, reinforcing it when they see something consistent with it but without the ability to directly confirm it?
 
Could it just be that they trust different people because of an accident of birth? After all, even someone brought up on a heavy diet of conspiracy theories can change their views if they are given the social safety net to do so.
 
By now you may be feeling disorientated. But that’s the point – to be on solid ground we need to think hard about who, or what, it is that we can genuinely trust.  

What we trust
Ultimately of course, it is not people we trust when we say we ‘know’ something, it is the self-correcting process of science itself. Overturning received wisdom brings great personal satisfaction and career reward so  someone somewhere will be trying to do this. Models that withstand this process for long enough are almost certainly correct, although they may still be oversimplifications of reality. But how much time has to pass before we can consider them 'facts'? The same biology teacher who taught us DNA to RNA to protein also taught us ‘one gene, one protein’. Alternate splicing had been discovered a few years earlier. I don't know whether he knew this already but it was clearly not yet on the syllabus. Indeed it was many years before anyone realised quite how widespread it is.   
 
How rigorous is this self-correction process and how long does it take? It can be extraordinarily hard, and take a long time, to overturn received wisdom. And personality still plays a role. Someone perceived as an ‘outsider’ is, sadly, less likely to be listened to – one of many justifications for us to address what is commonly called ‘unconscious bias’ (the topic of a forthcoming article). Barry Marshall famously had to resort to drinking H. pylori bacteria to overcome the decades old doctrine that excess acid causes stomach ulcers, work that led to his Nobel Prize. Not every ground-breaking research project gets the recognition it deserves in papers or grants. How many quit science before they get the recognition they deserve? Even peer review is imperfect so fundamentally flawed papers sometimes get into so-called ‘top’ journals, perhaps with even greater incentive to cross ethical boundaries for such ‘high profile’ publications. Using a journal’s reputation as a proxy for quality isn’t as reliable as it may seem. And just as flat earthers selectively interpret science, which of us, in all honesty, is as pleased to see data that disprove our hypothesis as data supporting it, especially when the latter is more likely to advance our career?

​So while it is true that science is a self-correcting process over the long-term, ‘long’ may mean periods longer than our career - not much use if you're hoping what you see as a breakthrough will help you get tenure. So how else can we know what to believe?

Trust in people
Until this bumpy process runs its course, how can we know where to place our trust? Trusting data that fit best with what we already believe doesn’t work because the whole point of research is to test whether existing models can be overturned. Basing trust on this really would make us no different from flat earthers. We can weigh the strength of the data supporting a new result against the data supporting our existing model, and ideally try to replicate some of it. However, this is limited to fields we know well enough to do this and we are unlikely to have time to replicate everything. Another marker is when papers are published from independent researchers that support it, but even here we need to be wary of the ‘bandwagon effect’, something I have definitely witnessed.
 
What about the person, or research group, involved? Could this be the basis for trust? Over many years I’ve become increasingly wary of focussing on ‘big names’ in a given field. Could they, for example, have become ‘big names’ through dominant personalities, having the right contacts or, worst of all, fraudulent papers that have not yet been exposed? What impresses me far more is groups that have consistently published work that other people can build on.
 
We need instead to go back to the fundamentals of the markers of trust: body language, openness, humility, competence, a willingness to listen to other views. All of these are best assessed in person, one of the main reasons why in person conferences are indispensable. Nothing informs us of a scientist’s integrity quite like seeing whether a conference speaker answers questions directly and openly, or dodges them like a slippery politician, and seeing their body language as they do so.

The modern world
Crucially, video conferencing is a poor substitute for these, especially with people we have not met previously in person. Information from the Internet, social media or artificial intelligence tells us even less about any of the above. We need to be particularly careful that our emotional reaction to the unquestionable speed and power of AI does not trigger us into believing its output too readily. My guess is that, in time, we will slowly learn to trust some AI providers more than others but we are barely at the beginning of that journey right now with all kinds of risks of picking up false beliefs when there is apparent authority but no body language to guide us. 

Reducing anguish by understanding the trust-knowledge link
What we call ‘knowledge’ then is mostly a proxy for trust. This may explain why having it challenged can be so upsetting: to question our knowledge is to question our trust in the people who told us. But if we recognise this link and the need for a Bayesian approach to knowledge, constantly updating our beliefs as new information comes along this becomes easier to take. Instead of looking for false certainty, we can begin to see all knowledge as greyscale, with degrees of confidence that can be updated and occasionally radically overturned.
 
We need to feel the freedom to be wrong. Not only is this the key to new learning. It can give us a more peaceful life too.

Assimilate or accommodate?
As with geography, we assimilate minor changes easily. When we learn who to ask to order a reagent, or some new detail about a protocol, these are not sources of anguish. The map is recognisably the same, just with a minor tweak. 

​But some new experiences are so far-reaching they challenge our fundamental beliefs and upset us. When someone we trusted exploits us, presenting our idea as their own, or gossiping about something we told them in confidence, it shatters our trust in them and may even force us to review our trust in others too. Our first experience of a grant or paper rejection can throw us into turmoil, bedevilled by the question of whether it was us, or the decision process that failed. And each time we experience overwhelm we are forced to stop and question how it happened and what we could change to avoid it.  

Confusion and doubt
These are double hits: not only do we have to deal with the setback itself but it throws us into mental confusion about why we got it so wrong and what else we might be misinterpreting.
 
The mismatch between our beliefs and experience is known as cognitive dissonance. It feels bad, even if we don’t acknowledge it consciously, because it suggests something about our mental map is fundamentally wrong. A minor tweak won’t resolve it this time: it needs completely redrawing to accommodate this new experience. Only then can we decide how to move forward.
 
But does it have to feel bad? What if we can understand and accept the process and see it as a path to growth?

How our minds change – and whether they change
David McRaney’s book ‘How minds change’, especially the chapter titled ‘Disequilibrium’, and two episodes of his podcast ‘You are not so smart’ provide an excellent explanation of cognitive dissonance, which resonate strongly with how I find I have approached challenges like those described above.
 
He reasons that we evolved to be deeply reluctant to change our views on important topics. To do so would be to build our lives on shifting sand, unable to make progress on anything if we don’t hold on to some kind of strong beliefs. Shankar Vedantam in his deeply thought-provoking book ‘Useful Delusions’ also describes how our beliefs are tied up with our identities, a fundamental part of our social standing with our families, friends and colleagues. Changing too much risks exclusion by the people we most care about.  
 
McRaney explains that we need a ‘social safety net’ to change them – someone we respect and trust who aligns with our new beliefs. It can be hard for example to put forward a bold, new hypothesis unless we know our colleagues or collaborators support it because we fear the consequences if it turns out to be wrong. 

​Stability or change?
Fundamentally redrawing our societal mental map is destabilising. In addition to the social risk, it needs a lot of time and energy so our minds tend to avoid doing so unless absolutely necessary. How we do that is fascinating and explains a lot about research life.
 
One approach is to deny or trivialise the conflicting information. If a paper we know to be good is desk-rejected by the journal, it immediately throws our belief in our own competence into conflict with our faith in peer review. This is painful either way so we often dodge the issue, explaining it away as: “At least they told us quickly”. As though kicking out years of our best work without so much as an expert opinion is somehow OK! 
 
Another is to rationalise the conflict away, distorting or inventing facts if necessary: “The editor is biased” we may say, however little evidence we have.
 
Third, our unconscious minds grasp around for other information that increases consonance with our existing belief to outweigh the one that doesn’t fit: confirmation bias. “They reject lots of people’s papers”, we tell ourselves. This may be true, which may make us feel better about our paper but it still doesn’t mean the publication process identifies the best papers.
 
Eventually, however, there is so much conflicting evidence, or perhaps one event that is so strong, that we have to change our view to accommodate it. “In crisis, we become radically open to changing our mind”, writes McRaney. 

Shattering illusions
If we have a paper desk-rejected that eventually goes on to substantially advance the field, or the plans we proposed in old grants turn out, in hindsight, to have been transformative when someone is finally able to carry them out, this starts to question the validity of decision process itself. This might not be so painful if it wasn't a decision process with such consequences for our career prospects.
 
Like many who have been in this business for long enough, I’ve had these experiences repeatedly. But I have also had the opposite: projects that were funded but then floundered (hint: please don't stop funding our grants; I'm just being honest and pointing out that luck acts in both directions!). The remarkable story of Katalin Kariko, whose Nobel Prize winning research underlying the COVID-19 vaccine was repeatedly rejected both for funding and publication, eventually driving her out of academia altogether, further highlights that such decision making is imperfect.
 
Eventually, I found it hard to escape the thought that publication and funding decisions are not as effective as I had thought. Perhaps many researchers, especially in early career, still think this. 

Epiphanies
There is a reason we use the word ‘disillusioned’ for situations like this. But which one is the problem: our new insight or the illusion we carried in the first place?
 
The surprise for me has been that once I accepted how flawed these systems actually are, processes I had trusted throughout my career, and when I stopped looking for people to blame because I’ve also seen from the decision-maker’s side how hard it is to be sure, my motivation actually increased. This reminds me of the Stockdale paradox, originally described for a situation of far greater hardship. The moment we admit to ourselves the full brutality of the situation is the same moment we can begin to engage with finding our way forward.

It is not the paradigm shift that is hard to live with, it's the dissonance that precedes it!

​For balance I should add that I have also received many peer review comments that have improved our work.  At its best, peer review is a vital process that overcomes the unavoidable self-serving bias that all authors have by bringing new perspectives from people unconnected with the work. I also believe that grant committees do enrich for (as opposed to specifically select) the best projects, and their members try extremely hard to do so. But these decisions are themselves riskier and noisier than many of us imagine. 

Letting go of dissonance to move forward
The mechanisms underlying cognitive dissonance, and our inherent resistance to changing our beliefs, probably evolved in our tribal ancestors, keeping them loyal to their tribe unless all was lost. In today’s ever-changing world it is everywhere, with modern challenges constantly straining those ancient impulses. As scientists, we encounter it every day when our love for research comes up against our dislike of much that comes with it: the funding uncertainty, the administrative burden, some personalities and the limitations of peer review, for example. Once we accept these flaws, however, we can fully appreciate the positives of a research life of which there are many. In the end, the autonomy to follow our curiosity while actually getting paid for it is a privilege shared by few in our society. Only then can we find our way around these frustrations instead of wasting energy anguishing about them. 

​
​Our chosen scapegoats may not be perfect, but neither are we! We are, after all, the one who tried to cram an unrealistic amount into our day, despite years of evidence that no day ever goes quite to plan! To expect other people to attend to our needs instantly and perfectly, when they may also be overburdened or under the weather is simply unrealistic. And if a reviewer misunderstands our paper, doesn’t this mean some readers might also struggle to follow it? The need for us to clarify the wording is important feedback. But in our mind, it’s their fault, pure and simple!
 
Attribution errors sit alongside misunderstanding of emotions and heuristics in human thinking flaws, and scientists are no different. What roles does this play in making our research lives more difficult than they need to be? How can we get a better grip on reality to avoid this? And how do we avoid going too far the other way, blaming ourselves for everything? 

​What we are actually doing when we blame others is diverting attention from the only things we can truly change: our own thoughts and actions. Often these make far more contribution than we realise. But even when the explanation lies largely or wholly in events beyond our control – a difficult colleague, for example, or ever spiralling bureaucracy – we still have a choice in how we respond. Viktor Frankl’s book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ described how, even in a WW2 concentration camp, it was still possible to “choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances”. If he could face the threat of starvation and the gas chamber this way, surely we can stop anguishing over an extra form to fill in!

​Trapped and powerless
The first way blaming others harms us is by robbing us of our own agency. We can try to change others as much as we like, but since they, like everyone, have self-serving bias, they are highly unlikely to roll over and reform in the ways we would wish! 

​And still less can we change what we perceive as ‘the broken system’. Shooting the messenger, who may be just as frustrated with it as we are, only makes things worse. And often we misunderstand the complexity and true purpose of ‘the system’, as argued by Dan Davies in his book ‘The Unaccountability Machine’. My favourite chapter in this book is the one which, in my view, absolutely nails why science publishing is the way it is. As every manager learns when their ideals flounder, designing the perfect system is a lot harder than we think.
 
All we can realistically do is to accept what we cannot change, and channel our energy into what we can. If we remain fixated on the roles of others, we distract from this and never learn and grow.
 
Even when we are a ‘victim’ of external events – a flawed funding decision, for example, or being ‘scooped’ by a well-funded competing group – building an identity of ‘victimhood’ only holds us back. Complaining about administrators in response to some impasse, for example, stops us learning about the genuine complexities of a university environment, the workload they may be dealing with, or the lack of appreciation they may feel, eating away at motivation. We may be better served by identifying the most supportive people among them, showing true gratitude for their efforts and focussing on our shared humanity and goals. 

Culture is what we make it
The second big problem with blaming others is we damage our workplace culture, fostering negativity bias and cycles of mistrust and revenge. Inventing a perpetrator to sustain our self-justification leads us straight into the quagmire of the Karpman drama triangle, previously discussed in these blogs.  It’s not just us who end up powerless and trapped as ‘victims’ in this dysfunctional interaction, but also our perceived ‘perpetrators’ and the knights in shining armour who strive to ‘rescue’ us, all endlessly switching roles with one another in the most unhealthy of environments. This plays out at a tribal level too, when we begin to ‘other’ those in different job roles, instead of appreciating that they, like us, may be struggling with overwhelm, a challenging boss or striving to finish their work for a strict childcare pickup deadline. 

Even if some colleagues do need some frank but constructive feedback, do we actually give it to them or do we simply sound off to our friends and family who can also do nothing about it?  Negativity, or an ‘us and them’ culture, ultimately brings everyone down, including ourselves, and we lose sight of gratitude, one of the strongest motivational forces in the workplace. Who wants to be in a workplace where everyone complains? 

What goes around comes around
Thirdly, the way we treat others has its way of coming back to us. This works in both ways. Genuine recognition that others also have to deal with ‘stuff’ – unexpected problems and interruptions that derail their day, job security worries, family or health issues – will be strongly appreciated by most people, especially as so many are starved of such appreciation. This creates goodwill and the potential for reciprocation next time we are the one needing a favour, someone to go the extra mile on our behalf. In contrast, if we unfairly pin blame on others, it feeds a natural desire for revenge that ultimately holds back both parties. 

Unlocking the trap
If we are too ready to blame others, we make ourselves powerless, learn nothing, degrade our culture, go to the back of the queue for favours and put ourselves under unnecessary stress as we ready ourselves for revenge attacks. That’s quite a price to pay for a short-term feeling of righteousness.
 
But nor does it help to automatically blame ourself. Causation is rarely a black-and-white issue. Psychologists describe having an internal locus of control as the key to feeling in charge of our destiny, and to a large extent this is helpful, including in research. But in its extreme it leads to pointlessly beating ourselves up and exposing ourself to victim blaming, which helps no-one. As ever, we need to find a good balance, looking at our own contributions to the issue first, but adding a healthy dose of realism about external factors, recognising that explanations lie both within and outside ourselves.
 
Whatever we are facing, it will always be our own contributions to it, however small, that we can do most about. If we can recognise these first instead of last, or never at all, we can finally begin to move ourselves forward.

Self-serving bias has a close cousin: in-group bias. We may tell ourselves our group does better science than our competitors, that our generation has dealt with more hardship than others, that ‘all’ people in other job types (administrators, journal editors, funders, support staff, etc.) are not as committed as we are, or are less reasonable people.
 
As supposedly rational scientists, shouldn’t we make sure we have all the information we need before we form these beliefs? What makes us think we have sufficient knowledge of those other people’s lives, or indeed that we have an objective view of our own life? But every day we find ourselves slipping into these ways of thinking.
 
We are human after all, and these are common thinking errors that occur over and over in human thinking. But here’s the big question: how much anguish do we create for ourselves, and for our colleagues, by thinking this way?

​Why it feels natural
‘I’m good, we’re good’ thinking probably goes back to our origin as a tribal species, extremely deep roots that make it hard to avoid. If our ancestors had not believed in the qualities of their group, they would probably have been thrown out and eaten, along with anyone wallowing in self-pity. Evolution would have selected those who believed in themselves and who favoured their in-groups. We inherited their genes and, to some extent, their culture. Psychologists tell us emotions are faster and stronger than rational thought. Tens of thousands of years of natural selection cannot be overturned by the slow and energy-thirsty circuits of our rational brain regions, or by a few years of scientific training. We slip back into those patterns without even realising.

​

The root of all thinking flaws?
The belief that “I am a good person” has been suggested to be the primordial bias underlying most or all others. Even disreputable or evil people appear to justify their actions to themselves with some perverted narrative that they are doing the world a service, or simply “levelling the playing field” after some perceived wrongdoing to them. 

Most hypotheses are wrong
Confirmation bias favouring anything that reinforces it is an obvious trap that we all fall into regularly in everyday life – politics, social media, thinking in stereotypes, etc. – but as scientists this can be particularly harmful. For example, it is an inescapable fact that most hypotheses are wrong. No matter how brilliant we are, the odds against getting it right first time are heavily stacked against us. But self-serving bias makes it extraordinarily difficult to be even-handed in our thinking. Data supporting our hypothesis easily grabs our attention and sticks in our memory, while conflicting data reminds us that we can be wrong, an uncomfortable thought which, at worst, seems to threaten our sense of worth as a scientist. In fact, the opposite is true.  It is our job to question beliefs, even beliefs that are our own. This is how we fit in to this particular profession. And this is why we must never lose humility. 

Cognitive dissonance
When we find evidence contradicting our beliefs, we feel uneasy. This is cognitive dissonance – a topic for a forthcoming article. We resist changing our mind, as far as we can, sometimes using ever more improbable explanations for the stuff that doesn’t fit, before finally accepting that we have to change the model. “That reviewer criticising my paper is unreasonable”, we say. Until we meet them at a conference and find out over a beer that they, like us, are just ordinary people doing their best under pressure. So maybe we should listen after all – find the common ground where the real progress lies. The irony is that once we do this, it actually feels good – a paradigm shift, or epiphany. 

​David McRaney’s book ‘How minds change’ puts it best: “Mindless self-justification blocks our ability to even see our errors, let alone correct them”. But if we questioned ourself all the time we would live in ‘paralysis by analysis’, a world of constant uncertainty where nothing gets done. We have to find the right balance between having confidence in our models and questioning them. 

Control or luck?
The illusion of control is another consequence and that’s a problem. If we don’t recognise that luck, as well as ability, plays a role when we have a grant funded, then it follows that our rejected grants (the majority, for pretty much everyone!) must have been rubbish. Throw in a dose of negativity bias – another forthcoming topic – and we quickly enter a completely unnecessary and unproductive doom loop catastrophising about how useless we are.
 
Where are all the ‘villains’?
The Karpman drama triangle is another outcome, with victim, villain and rescuer all locking themselves into a futile cycle of self-justification producing endless heat but no light, and a lot of unnecessary upset and stress. Peer review in science is full of this. It’s tough to have our hard work criticised, so the author’s perspective is always going to be very different from a reviewer’s. How much of the apocryphal ‘Reviewer 2’ phenomenon can be explained not by an army of perceived ‘villains’ out there but regular scientists not considering this difference in perspective?  “We are all Reviewer 2 in someone’s academic story” says the Twitter handle.
 
And yet we live in fear of them. We don’t need to do this to ourselves!
 
Am I good enough?
The opposite to self-serving bias may be even more damaging: self-doubt. Many of us flip between believing we are a ‘good person’ and successful to questioning whether we are ‘good enough’, confident one day, anxious the next. Or we switch from blaming others for adverse events to blaming ourselves. What’s that about and where does the truth lie?
 
This is where attribution error combines with heuristics, putting our emotions firmly in the driving seat. We swing constantly from one oversimplification of reality to its opposite depending on anything from what else is going on in our lives to the weather. We look for simple explanations for complex events, attributing them all to ourselves or all to the world around us when in reality nearly everything is a combination of both. If we struggle to understand a paper or seminar, for example, this could reflect a limitation in our knowledge or a poor writing or presentation style. We tend to tell ourselves it’s all one or all the other but usually there is at least a small element of each.  
 
Confident humility
All that shifting of interpretations is draining and confusing. The Dunning-Kruger effect is our tendency to overestimate our competence and imposter syndrome is its counterpart. We like to label people as having one or the other but in reality we all have elements of each and fluctuate between them.
 
Adam Grant in his book Think Again describes how we can use ‘confident humility’ to overcome this. He describes this as combining confidence in moving towards our goals in the future with the humility to question whether we have the right skills right now. The optimum spot is not how much confidence we have but what we are confident in: not our knowledge or skills now, but our ability to learn and grow, moving constantly towards our goals even if we never fully reach them. It is well worth applying this thinking to the old chestnut of whether someone has ‘what it takes’ to become a PI. ‘What it takes’ may be much more about their ability to grow than what they are capable of today. 

Finding the middle ground
So whether we have a headwind or a tailwind, we can recognise that our mind will always play tricks on us. We live in a complex world where we only partially understand even our little corner of it, which we interpret emotionally long before our rational mind catches up. This is why having a break from our work in evenings, weekends and holidays matters. It brings us the perspective to spot the flaws in our thinking. Coaching can also help, as can the ability to laugh at ourselves. As scientists, questioning beliefs is our job. But occasionally the beliefs we need to question are our own.

Availability
The availability heuristic, Kahneman and Tversky explain, is our tendency to base our thoughts around the information most readily available to us at the time, while overlooking our wider experience. 

​We are heavily influenced, for example, by the recency of an experience. If our experiment just failed or our grant was rejected, we can begin catastrophising especially if we are tired or run down. On the worst days we may even slide into: “I’d better find another career!”. Perspective is the antidote to this. Pausing to consider the wider picture can play a huge role in smoothing out the unavoidable ups and downs of research life. How did we feel last week when we got an interesting result? Or when we got the offer letter for our current job or studentship? Whatever challenge we are facing, how did we overcome a similar one previously? How big a problem is this anyway in the big scheme of our lives?
 
The availability heuristic may contribute to imposter syndrome in several ways. Our own painful memories of struggles, rejections and self-doubt are far more known to us than those of other people, so they play a far greater role in our awareness. We are hard wired to compare ourselves with others but much of the time we only notice their successes. So, we base our comparison on totally unequal datasets: our fears and doubts and their achievements. What an absurd thing for a scientist to do but we’ve all been there!
 
Even among other people, we tend to pay more attention to outstanding successes than to those who are struggling just like us. It’s so easy to get the impression we are in a minority being left behind but a more careful look around us often reveals a large majority of our peers who are struggling and striving in ways just like ourselves. 

Negativity bias
This problem is further enhanced by the fact that negative emotions and memories are often more easily accessible to us than positive ones. This is probably a reflection of how we evolved (more on negativity bias in a future post). So we often remember paper and grant rejections more strongly than acceptances or awards, fuelling an expectation of rejection as we write a new one, even at an unconscious level that may manifest as procrastination. Similarly, we base conclusions about research culture on a few bad actors while overlooking the large majority good colleagues around us. 

The screen in front of us
We see the availability heuristic at work in electronic communications too. Screens just centimetres from our face increasingly grab our attention in ways that a real life colleague across the room does not. We often feel compelled to react to an email instead of staying proactive about our own list of priorities for the day: “Our email inbox is a great task list of other people’s priorities” says leadership expert Conor Neill, and the immediacy of the screen in front of our eyes plays a part in channelling us down this spiral. Meanwhile the algorithms of the distraction economy intentionally predict and exploit what we will react to most, grabbing our attention, distracting us from the task at hand. Some social media platforms in particular do this by creating an illusion of divisiveness that blinds us to collaborative and supportive actions all around us that far outnumber the arguments they push at us.

Anchoring
The anchoring bias is our tendency to start with the first piece of information available to us, or the status quo. Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated its hold over us by showing that even prior exposure to a randomly generated number can influence how we think.
 
It plays out in interviews where decisions are typically made in the first few minutes. We (or our interviewers) spend the rest of the time confirming that decision, and it takes something dramatic to change it such as a major faux pas or spark of genius. A future article will consider just how hard it is to change our minds and why.
 
Similarly, if we think we’ve found the ‘perfect’ job it is particularly hard to remain open-minded to others who report a negative experience there, and few people actively seek them out. Once we become excited about it, confirmation bias is mostly in charge but we may live to regret it.
 
Anchoring also stops us challenging current working models in our science nearly as much as would be useful. And we continue to accept workplace practices that have long outlived their usefulness, such as the extraordinary inefficiencies of scientific publishing in a world of instant and free communication.
 
Other examples include sticking too rigidly to our original project when new opportunities present themselves. If Alexander Fleming had done this, the world would have waited much longer for antibiotics. We struggle to let go of our original hypothesis when the data argue against it. Similarly, we may stay in a job we don’t like for far too long because we have lost the wider perspective of what the alternatives could be. 

What can we do about it?
As outlined in Series 1 and 2, so many of our problems come from misunderstanding our emotions. Emotions channel our limited supplies of energy and attention to specific areas of our lives so we can bring all our resources to dealing with challenging issues. This can be extremely useful, bringing us the motivation to get the job done, the joy and excitement when things go well, or sadness that forces us to slow down and reflect when they don’t. But our emotions evolved for a very different environment, not for the complexity of modern society with its level of unpredictable chaos.
 
Chaos is scary. We don’t like to think how much randomness there is in our lives, and of how much we can neither understand nor predict it. We feel more secure if we believe we know more than we do. We easily slip into treating our heuristics as conclusions rather than hypotheses. When things don’t work out we resort to blaming “other people”, but while some people do let us down there is usually little we can do to change them. So we lock ourselves into a circle of confirmation bias and disappointment. The alternative is to accept the outcome as soon and as painlessly as we can, adjust our expectations – our models – and eventually raise our chance of success.
 
For big decisions, Kahneman’s suggested deliberately exploring our thoughts on multiple days when we are in different moods (to ‘sleep on it’) so we can be more confident that these decisions work regardless of each day’s emotions. Similarly, we can minimise anchoring by deliberately recalling the facts in a different order. We can purposely look for perspective, celebrate our successes so we remember them better, and move tasks from our email inbox to our ‘to do’ list where they have to compete with our own priorities. We can have the humility to accept that we may be wrong, and perhaps even enjoy the learning opportunity so that we can now be ‘less wrong’. But to do so requires an environment of psychological safety, which explains why this is so import to learning.

​So, can we use objective, rational thinking to make better decisions and lower our anguish when things don’t turn out as hoped? Yes, to some degree. We all have days that are harder – when we are tired, overstretched or run down. But we can always try to recognise that our models are just hypotheses and that many of our plans have a high chance of being knocked off course by events beyond our control, but have the courage to go ahead regardless with our best guess of the right course of action.
 
And just like in research, occasionally luck will go our way. 

​Crucially, they warned, “Experienced researchers are also prone to the same biases”. Indeed, Kahneman describes how they developed their hypotheses by looking at, and laughing at, the flaws in their own thinking, an inspirational example of how humility strengthens research.
 
So, half a Century on, what can we learn from Kahneman and Tversky about the flaws in our own thinking? By becoming more aware of them, can we strengthen not only our research but also our wellbeing as we carry out that research? Can we use more critical thinking about our own thinking? 

​The value and cost of simplification
You may have already fallen into a classic thinking trap right at the start of this article. To a scientist, the words ‘Nobel Prize winner’ scream ‘prestige’, ‘eminence’, the pinnacle of human thinking. It sparks our interest in learning from them. In a world with more information than we could ever take in, let alone understand, it’s one of the ways we simplify it to make any kind of sense. ‘Nobel Prize winners are smart people’, we tell ourselves. But some also espouse unfounded and profoundly immoral thoughts so perhaps it’s not quite that straightforward. If we become dazzled by accolades, and lose sight of critical thinking, the world of certainty that we seek becomes one of chaos and confusion instead.  
 
All models are wrong, but some are useful 
Our understanding of the world is based around patterns that we observe and our prediction that they will recur. We simplify its true complexity using heuristics that work most of the time. For example, most Nobel Prize winners are indeed smart people, possibly all, even if some have dumb ideas too. We use heuristics constantly, often without realising. Just like models in research, they are essential for understanding the world but all models have limitations. The danger comes if and when we believe them to represent the world as it truly is, known as naïve realism. Thankfully, few people share James Watson’s racist views, but it illustrates perfectly the risks of becoming blinded by accolades and endorsements. The same applies to ‘big’ journals, prestigious institutions, the ‘big names’ in any research field. As soon as we rely on this alone we risk losing the plot.
 
In their 1974 article, Tversky and Kahneman highlighted three types of heuristics: representativeness, availability and anchoring. So how does each of these play out in the scientific workplace? This article discusses representativeness and the next will cover availability and anchoring.

What’s the evidence?
Representativeness is our tendency to base our understanding and predictions on limited evidence. We cannot possibly know everything we need for a perfect decision. We have to choose between using our intuition to infer a common pattern from limited data or ‘paralysis by analysis’, a futile attempt to understand everything before we take action.

​Hypothesis or conclusion?
Intuition is ultimately educated guesswork. A hypothesis! As scientists we know the dangers of confusing hypothesis with conclusion, opinion with fact, but if we can never have all the data we need we have no choice but to follow our gut sometimes. The problem is when we don’t know we’re doing that, and we slip into ‘black-and-white thinking’ about a greyscale word. We misjudge the level of uncertainty, risk and noise that exist, leading us to focus on the wrong solutions. We wrongly attribute causality when things go wrong, or even when they go right. We unnecessarily beat ourselves up or look for someone to blame, sparking unnecessary conflict.

The ’Reviewer 2’ phenomenon
Tversky and Kahneman also showed that we pay disproportionate attention to how we perceive people’s characters, while discounting other data. We don’t know, for example, who our reviewers are, and we lack the nonverbal cues so vital for understanding intention. But as soon as they suggest an additional experiment that cannot feasibly be done, we so often head straight down the rabbit hole of thinking they are trying to block our paper! A simple smile or frown may have enabled us to judge this better but we don’t have that. All we have is a page of disembodied words sent via a third party but we think we know! Many of us have done this, including me, only to realise on re-reading their comments the next morning that they may actually just be enthusiastic and want to know more.

​It gets even worse if we begin to think about ‘the reviewers’ as if they were a separate species, forgetting that we are also reviewers, as is the colleague we enjoyed chatting with over coffee at a conference. As in any area of life, a tiny minority of reviewers are genuinely obstructive, a phenomenon I’ve seen maybe just two or three times in 30 years, and which hasn’t always prevented a successful outcome if handled calmly. The vast majority are doing their best under a lot of pressure, just like us. Similarly, we often form unfavourable opinions about ‘administrators’, ‘funders’, ‘the competition’ or ‘editors’ based on anecdotal experience alone, with little or no personal interaction, and little understanding of the pressures they work under. The siloed structure of our institutions does not help but so often we surrender our thinking to the barriers this creates instead of working to overcome them with a Zoom call or a chat over a cup of tea. Apparently, we think this way is easier!

Too judgemental
Our overconfidence in simple explanations leads us to expect individual characters to be consistent and unwavering. We excuse our own day-to-day fluctuations with “I didn’t sleep well” or “I have a lot going on right now” but expect others to be always on top of their game, an example of self-serving bias discussed more in a later article. Similarly, we label people as ‘having what it takes’, or not, at a young age, despite our own stuttering progress at the same age and how much we developed since. Why can they not also grow? 

Guesswork
Similar uncertainty applies in other areas of our research life: which lab to work in, who to recruit, where to send our paper, what to write in our grant application, what to prioritise our time on this week, or whether to develop that new idea into a project or stay focussed on what we are doing.  The only correct answer is: “I cannot know for sure, but I’ll take an educated guess”. The idea that we do not know for sure scares us so we try to ignore it, thinking that we do know, until reality comes along and upsets us by contradicting our expectations. 

Thinking like a scientist to reduce anguish
The great irony here is that, as scientists, we know what to do. We just don’t apply it to our research lives in the way we do to our experiments. In our science, we do not draw conclusions when we have insufficient data, as we do when guessing the intention of the reviewer. We recognise the concept of biological or technical variability, accepting that multiple replicates are needed to get a true picture, yet we see a single grant or paper rejection as questioning our worth as a scientist. We know what it means to have a working model that we modify as new data emerge, a Bayesian thinking model, but we make snap judgements about other people and stick to them. Part of the solution to our tangled lives could lie in applying the ordered, rational thinking we use every day in our science to how we approach research life 

​This is not a perfect solution - the uncertainty in life is usually greater than in our science and harder to quantify, and the stakes are sometimes higher. But in formulating our thoughts, we can be open to all sources of data and wary of confirmation bias. When we are job hunting, for example, we can proactively seek both the positive and negative experiences of current and former employees. When writing a grant or a paper, we can ask for feedback from colleagues, putting aside our natural aversion to criticism. And we can improve how we plan our time by reviewing each week how our plans actually worked out last week and learning from it.
 
And when things don’t work out, we can avoid rushing to judgement and being too quick to blame either others or ourselves. We can remember that we started from a hypothesis, based around considerable uncertainty, not from a conclusion. Upsetting events will still happen, sometimes with important consequences, but if we acknowledge the roles of intuition and luck, and the inherent risks in extrapolating from limited data at least the outcome doesn’t have to be so bewildering even when it is not the one we hoped for.

​We often do equally illogical things when something goes wrong. When an experiment fails, for example, we can quickly find ourselves asking which reagent is off, whether the equipment is faulty, or even looking for ways to pin blame on someone else, perhaps even on the weather. Then later we find out we’d misread the protocol. When a reviewer criticises our paper, we imagine we know their personality and intentions despite having no idea who it is and no facial expressions to guide us. Why do we delude ourselves like this?
 
This is our everyday life as researchers, getting ourselves into all kinds of misunderstandings and confusion: black-and-white thinking, confusing opinion with fact, misattributing causality, confirmation bias, undue negativity and more. We see it in others all the time but we are blind to it in ourselves.
 
Why do we do this to ourselves? How much easier would our life be with more clarity in our thinking? And can we at least move a little in that direction?

​Thinking traps and blindspots
“Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalising animal”, Robert Heilein, ‘Assignment in Eternity’ (1953)
 
Our days flash by at an astonishing pace. Our heads contain amazing computing power but, like the AI trying to mimic us, it takes a lot of energy. The rational part of our brain needs even more energy and, to make matters worse, it is slow. No matter how clever we are, running through the infinite number of possible thoughts and actions about any given situation would quickly fry our brain. We have to narrow them down first.
 
We do this in two ways. First, we use short cuts, known as heuristics. These are rules of thumb based on generalisations from our past experience, which never was more than a partial reflection of reality and has since been corrupted by limitations of our memory. They work most of the time but they lack detail and are not good at handling exceptions.
 

​Second, our emotions channel us towards some types of reaction and away from others. If our rational mind is involved at all, some argue, it’s only in making the final decision from the shortlist our emotions offer us. 
 
But here’s the twist: we all have a deep, emotional need to believe we are a ‘good person’: self-serving bias. As civilised human beings, and scientists no less, we struggle with the idea that our emotions have such influence over our thoughts and actions, and that we simplify so much. So we invent supposedly rational explanations that we genuinely believe, tying our thinking in all kinds of knots to do so. Our bias blindspot make us believe only other people are irrational, but we are too. After all, to them we are ‘other people’! 

​Confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance
We get ourselves into even more scrapes when we confuse our simplified mental map of the world, our heuristics, with the real thing, known as naïve realism, and something unexpected happens that doesn’t fit with our map. For example, many of us start our career believing that ‘big’ journals publish the best science. Some still believe this, but many of us have seen plenty of exceptions. The first time we see a flawed paper in a ‘big’ journal it creates confusion. Our first instinct is to question our own understanding: “I must be missing something!”. Or we may continue to believe the paper even as evidence to the contrary slowly stacks up. Something deep down though doesn’t feel right, so we seek confirmatory evidence to reduce the discomfort. “That famous PI must be right. Look at all those other ‘big’ papers they published!”. Eventually, the dissonance becomes too much and we change our mind about the paper, and perhaps our level of trust in ‘big’ journals too. Through such processes we learn that what we believed to be our ‘knowledge’ is actually just our trust in someone else’s views. Sometimes, to advance our knowledge we have to question that trust, and this can be painful to do. Perhaps this is why we will tell ourselves all kinds of stories to dodge the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. 

Whose fault is it anyway?
In our experiments, we learn just how difficult it is to establish causality. But in everyday life, with all its complexities and unknowns, we think we know. We underestimate the role of luck and of our unconscious minds, along with the choices we have in how readily we accept, and how to interpret events beyond our control. “We control nothing, but influence everything”, says UCL Associate Professor and author Brian Klaas.
 
Consider a grant application. We control every word until hitting ‘submit’. The next steps are all down to luck: who reviews it, who presents it in the committee, their personality and mood on the day, which other proposals we are competing against, and how forcefully other committee members advocate for them, and yet many, especially in early career as I did, see this process as objective.  Once we are told about the outcome, we are again in control of how we deal with that but we don’t sense the tricks our unconscious minds play on us. We look for simple explanations for complex events, telling ourselves for example: “My grant was rejected because I’m a useless scientist” or: “The reviewers were biased”, when neither of these extremes is likely to be true.  
 
When looking at other people, however, we easily slip into thinking they have total control,  so anything that goes wrong their fault, the fundamental attribution error. For example, if our colleague turns up late for a meeting we assume they are disorganised or disrespectful, without considering whether they stopped on the way there to help someone in urgent need.

Series 3: the price we pay for heuristics and biases
Series 3 of Science Without Anguish explores all of these thinking flaws and simplifications, along with negativity bias, the curse of knowledge and ‘unconscious bias’ or implicit association, with examples of the problems we cause for ourselves and our colleagues if we don’t occasionally stop to challenge our own thinking. 

​

​Crucially, as illustrated at the beginning, being a scientist doesn’t stop us falling into these thinking traps. As human beings with needs and fears like everyone else, we are no different. But if we use that same questioning mind to think about our own psychology from time to time, this can help us. Physicists, says David McRaney, tell us there’s no chemistry without physics, and chemists say biology is nothing but complex chemistry. The reality though is that there is no physics, chemistry or biology without psychology.
 
Enjoy reading and please share with your colleagues!

​A lot of time has passed. Today, we have social media, other excellent books and courses, graduate programmes, and mentoring initiatives. But isolation remains an issue.
 
I’ve often felt isolated as a PI too. This seems paradoxical because a PI’s job involves far more people interaction than working at the bench does. But feeling understood can be further away than ever.
 
Staring at a grant rejection email, knowing I have to break the bad news to my group, is a very lonely place to be.  Figuring out how to handle a challenging workplace conversation, when confidentiality prevents me discussing it with colleagues feels like there is nowhere to turn.
 
In the context of a world with a crisis of isolation outside science too, how can we handle this better? And what can we do to support others?

​Not all science is isolating
Another memory from my PhD, however, is my first conference, the ‘European Cytoskeletal Club’ in Lyon. Our lab had two PhD students at the time - Janice Robertson and myself, both of us now PIs. I distinctly remember how excited we both were to pluck up the courage to ask questions after presentations. I have no memory of what we asked or whether any of my questions made any sense at all, but people actually answered! The feeling that ‘we can be part of this’ was amazing!
 
Throughout my time as a postdoc and still today, I’ve always found conferences tremendously motivating. Weeks of pipetting between Eppendorfs and cell culture dishes find their true meaning when someone excitedly asks questions about the data on your poster. And the perfect antidote to all those grant rejections (apart from the lack of money!) is seeing people highly focussed on your presentation and hurriedly scribbling down notes. Suddenly, all those lonely hours at the bench or on the laptop are worth it!

​Helping others to help ourselves
The research world places a rather misleading emphasis on individual achievement. We remember first authors and Nobel Prize winners but forget the dozens of others who contribute in so many ways, from co-authors to cleaners.  Perhaps because of this, we often get obsessed with what we achieve ourselves and overlook the importance of, and what we also gain from supporting others.
 
This harms us. There is compelling research showing we often find it more rewarding to help others than to indulge ourselves. If we focus only on our next first author paper we are missing a trick. Our careers are judged primarily on papers and grants, which make us feel briefly better on the good days when they go our way. But for lasting satisfaction, it can be as therapeutic as any mindfulness course to see a teenager’s face light up when we present our work in a school, to support a mentee to overcome issues we previously struggled with ourself, or to train a graduate student to become proficient in a technique and put it to good use. It is for similar reasons that I write these blog posts – I’m actually helping myself!
 
Relating this to the previous section, there is nothing more lonely than a crowded conference room where everyone but us seems to know one another. As PIs, or other experienced colleagues, we can help not only our students but also ourselves by making introductions and by participating in mentoring sessions.

​Success and despair
Another occasion when we can gain particular satisfaction from connecting is in celebrating our successes together, or supporting our friends and colleagues when things don't go so well – a rejection, a failed experiment or being scooped. Sharing positive emotional experiences intensifies these feelings and supporting others not only makes us feel better about our own actions but also makes reciprocation more likely when we are the one needing support.

​Our need to connect can be a source of creativity
Our primal need to belong can be a powerful, unconscious driver of creativity when we are suddenly surrounded by relative strangers. When we move to a new lab or department, when we visit a collaborator and talk over dinner, and when we chat with an acquaintance over coffee at a meeting, a part of us is naturally searching for connections. Finding common ground in our scientific knowledge and ideas is an obvious source. Moving the discussion out of our comfort zone into areas we know less about suddenly becomes more appealing, with a sense of opportunity to balance the vulnerability. When both parties do the same, there can be some particularly fertile centre ground where new ideas lie. 

​New technologies
Social media offers a lot of new ways to connect, helping us to disseminate our findings and to share experiences both positive and negative. This is especially effective if we also work to deepen these connections in person at conferences. The current migration of large number of scientists on social media from Twitter to BlueSky has created a mixing up of these networks. It will be interesting to see what creativity stems from this.
 
Other new technologies, from email and instant messaging to webinars and Zoom/Teams meetings, further extend opportunities for connection between scientists anywhere in the world. Like social media, these cannot substitute for in-person meetings but are better viewed as an addition to them. Our opportunities for connection today are more than ever before but we now need to avoid having so many that they become superficial. Networks matter, but deep connections are where the real support lies when we need it. 

​Science is a communal effort
The popular image of a scientist is that of a lone thinker, tinkering away in the lab until they hit a eureka moment and rush out to tell the world. This image could not be more misleading. No idea comes from a single person. It always builds on thoughts communicated by others, whether in the same research group or beyond. Without this, we would still be inventing the wheel. This is why similar findings are so often published simultaneously by several groups. Different experts in a research field each think of the obvious (to them at least) next step that builds on what others have just reported.
 
And even if we do rush out shouting ‘eureka’, real science does not work this way either. Critical assessment by others, whose careers and self-esteem are not inextricably linked to the work, and who can therefore be more objective, is essential to keep our collective endeavour on track – peer review, in other words.
 
We like to believe in the myth of the scientist who knows it all and does it all. They don’t exist! But the real danger comes if we try to be that person. Cutting ourselves off in the hope of being that legendary ‘lone genius’ will not only hold back our science: it will harm us in the process.   

The importance of agency
The feeling of being able to exert control over our environment, and to some extent over our destiny, is one of the most basic human needs. Our brains are wired to feel pleasure from having agency over our lives. Even our health depends on it.
 
At its best, research fulfils this need very well. Many of us have substantial autonomy over our research topic and over how we organise our day, while actually getting paid for it.
 
However, it comes as part of a package in which we seem to have very little agency in other areas of our work. Whether it’s a compulsory training course or a meeting where we feel unable to speak, the contrast could not be greater.

​For people drawn to academic freedom, having less freedom on other issues can seem particularly problematic. It helps to understand why these limits are there, and to ask: ‘What agency do we have?’ and ‘How can we use it?’.    

​Accepting the inevitable
There are plenty of truths of research life we can do nothing about, like them or not. Our work has to be done within legal, financial and ethical constraints. We can't drive our bus the wrong way down a one-way street and we do have to stop at red lights!
 
We have to compete for funding, papers and jobs, and research outcomes are uncertain. Our bus shares the road with other vehicles.
 
We have no option here apart from one straightforward choice. Are the parts of research we like the most worth the challenges and limitations in how we do it? The answer will be different for everyone but we can each figure it out. Our agency lies in that choice.

​The grey zone
The next level of truths is harder to accept. It feels like they ‘shouldn’t’ be the case but they are! We can kick and scream all we like – and we all do that sometimes – but they still are the case and always will be!
 
Large organisations such as universities cannot function without rules and bureaucracy. As size and complexity increase, inefficiencies arise. Peer review is imperfect. Some colleagues are unreasonable. Good scientists do not automatically make good leaders and managers.

​There also isn’t enough money to fund all good ideas. Our bus needs fuel and it is expensive.

​We sometimes have a bit of control over these issues, but it requires a lot of effort. We can, for example, complain to an editor about an unreasonable peer reviewer comments and occasionally this works (just three times in my career to be precise!). We have complete control over the wording of our grant application until we press ‘submit’, after which luck plays a huge role. PIs can work on their leadership and management skills and gradually improve. And if we campaign for months or years, we might get one out-of-date rule removed.

​
​Pick your battles
All of these interventions cost time and energy. Both of these are limited so we have to be realistic about what can be achieved. In early career, many of us fight too many battles until we learn what is, and isn’t possible within our lifetime.
 
There is powerful morality around ‘good’ people not taking a stance. Dante’s Inferno even says they are heading for the ‘Vestibule of Hell’! But fighting too many minor battles leaves us with no energy for those that really matter.

​Control the controllables
‘Control the controllables’ is a widely discussed concept in many areas of life, including sport, business, health and wellbeing, even war. But in academia I know of only one person who has said it. There may be others but it is far too rare. 
 
Are we missing a trick?
 
For example, our training course may be compulsory but if it’s online we can choose when to do it. If lab equipment breaks we can’t use it but we can choose to reschedule or look for alternative equipment elsewhere. If we are too busy, we do not have to slip into overwhelm. We can begin to say ‘no’ before our emotions lead us down that slippery slope.

​Losing it!
“Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will rule our life and we will call it Fate”.  Attributed to Carl Jung, psychiatrist.
 
Our biggest loss of agency comes from letting our emotions take over. No-one sews our lips together to stop us speaking in a meeting. No-one holds a gun to our head to force us to review more than our share of papers. Even an unsupportive supervisor does not literally chain us to the bench. What holds us back is emotions and how we react to them - embarrassment, guilt, fear, insecurity.

​Feeling these emotions is normal but we can choose how to respond. If our bus is blocked by traffic congestion, we do not have to rage about it so we arrive feeling utterly drained. We can instead choose to reluctantly accept what we cannot change so we retain a clear mind for when we get the chance to use it. 
 
The problem here is that our emotions did not evolve to handle inefficient university administration or the infamous ‘Reviewer 2’! Humans evolved in smaller, less complex communities. Many of the emotions we feel today were appropriate for that environment but have not yet adapted to modern society. We often have far more agency than we think if we understand and manage our emotions.

​Handing control to others
Once we let our emotions power the bus, we give the key to other people. We become more susceptible to influence by culture or manipulation. We all know the feeling of working later than we want to because others are still in the lab or office. We’ve all pretended at some point to know more than we do because we fear the consequences of revealing that we don’t, feeding imposter syndrome and overwhelm. Similarly, a lack of psychological safety can intimidate us from speaking up.
 
But even here we have agency. We can remove ourselves temporarily from the environment so we can find the right space to think clearly and find a way forward. We can speak to a trusted colleague, or someone outside our immediate workplace to help figure out our best solution. Or we can sign up for assertiveness training, or coaching.  There is always something we can do.

​The drama triangle
Perhaps the most common agency-sapping role of all is the Karpman Drama Triangle. More likely than not, we are each in one or more of them right now. And if we aren't, we've certainly been there. We become trapped by our emotional reactions, constantly swapping places, generating a lot of noise but little progress.

As previously discussed, the Karpman drama triangle consists of a perceived ‘victim’, who feels unable to resolve a problem themselves; a ‘rescuer’, who feels motivated to support them but gets locked into co-dependency with them; and a perceived ‘villain’, who feels endlessly compelled to justify their actions.
 
For example, a student (‘victim’) feels unfairly treated by their supervisor (‘villain’) and complains to their department head (‘rescuer’) who tries to intervene. The supervisor, who is doing their best but has an endless to-do list with other major responsibilities, now feels misunderstood and begins to identify as a victim, seeing the department head as a villain for not understanding them. The department head, who is even busier, now feels frustrated and overwhelmed and on a bad day may even begin to see the student as the problem.
 
And so it goes on, probably pulling in other people too. No-one gets anywhere and a lot of energy is wasted. But for all three there is a way out if each of them can find their own agency in the situation. What really needs to happen is a frank but fair conversation between the student and supervisor, where each explains their perspective and gains greater understanding of the other. The department head can facilitate this, ensuring there is full and respectful engagement on both sides, but often will not need to be involved directly. Everybody wins. The student grows. The supervisor learns. And the department head gets an altogether healthier and more productive unit.
 
It is of course important to say there are sometimes very genuine grievances that do need direct intervention from others. There are occasional cases of seriously unreasonable behaviour by someone who will not listen, and this is particularly problematic when there is a big power differential.  But most of the time when problems arise it is because the parties do not understand each other's perspective and are not communicating properly to resolve it.

​The keys to our bus then lie in understanding the reality of the situation (what can be changed and what cannot); controlling the controllables (especially our response to emotions); picking our battles (channelling energy where it matters most); driving the route we choose with purpose and commitment; and taking the initiative to get back on track when we break down.
 
Agency matters and we always have more than we think!

​Staying on the right side of this fine line is a challenge. If we had a better understanding of what drives imposter feelings in research, could we learn how to harness their stimulus for growth instead of damaging our wellbeing and productivity?

​Feelings are not facts
Feeling anxious when we are outside our comfort zone is completely normal and healthy. Like all uncomfortable emotions, this anxiety is a message, prompting us to take an action to remove it. One possible action is to make a plan to learn and grow into the role so we feel more relaxed doing it in future. Another is to consciously choose to avoid it. Each option will have some consequences, but the important point is to consider all the pros and cons and make this choice rationally.
 
This can go wrong if we confuse feelings with facts. Our emotions are always stronger than our rational mind but as long as we are rested and relaxed we can usually deal with them. When we are tired or stressed, however, we lack the capacity to challenge our feelings of anxiety with factual evidence to the contrary. Crucially, we may lose perspective about our ability to grow. If this goes unchecked, we begin to interpret this uncomfortable feeling as an objective and unchangeable fact about ourselves. 

Sources of imposter feelings in research

Comparison
It is natural to compare the inside our ourselves with the outside of others. We simply interpret the information we have available about ourselves and others but forget that the comparison is unequal.
 
For example, we could have an identical experience to another scientist such as two rejections of our paper before acceptance in a third journal. Each of us sees only the success of the other, while remaining scarred by our own rejections.
 
Similarly, I have often congratulated a young scientist on an excellent oral presentation at a conference and been told: “But I was dying inside!”. But only they knew - everyone else just saw the excellent presentation!

Specialisation
Like the cells in our bodies, we all become more specialised. We wouldn't consider a neuron somehow ‘inferior’ to a B-lymphocyte because it can’t secrete antibodies. It can do other things of course! Equally then, it makes no sense for a neuroscientist to feel inferior if they can’t understand every detail of an immunology seminar, or vice versa, but somehow this can happen! Or we may feel deficient if we struggle to review a paper at the edge of our expertise. Sometimes these ‘imposter feelings’ give us the useful message that it would help to learn more. But other times they just reflect different areas of expertise. 

​Negativity bias
Humans have an inbuilt negativity bias. We often focus more on how far we have ‘left to go’ (to whatever our goal may be) than on how far we have come. This leads to a feeling of never being ‘good enough’, no matter what we might have already achieved. For example, we may publish a nice paper but then focus more on its caveats than its findings, forgetting that all papers have caveats. Or if our experiment fails, we focus on that more than the exciting result we got a few weeks earlier.
 
Poorly worded feedback
Peer review plays a crucial role in upholding objectivity in science. We may scrutinise our own results to the best of our ability but since they are linked to our careers, full objectivity is impossible. That is why review by others is needed. However, careless wording in a peer review does sometimes occur and this is fuel to the fire of imposter syndrome. “I knew I wasn’t good enough”, we might tell ourselves, “and now this reviewer has confirmed it: they said my work is just preliminary!”.
 
Moving up
Any promotion or award can trigger imposter syndrome, even in Nobel Prize winners. However, the move from postdoc to PI is a particularly common trigger. The learning curve is steep, especially around managing people rather than experiments, dealing with administration, and the many new responsibilities from health and safety to keeping your group funded. Meanwhile, your own lab skills gradually erode, until your postdocs and students are actually better in the lab than you are. This is a tough transition. It is easy to get trapped into focussing on what you are losing and overlook what you are gaining.
 
Other people’s imposter feelings
A small minority of people artificially boost their ego by denying their own imposter feelings. The result is often to project their anxiety onto others, provoking more imposter feelings in them due to the apparently unfavourable comparison. This the approach of a real imposter, who feels better (at someone else’s expense) but learns nothing.

Solutions
What then can keep us on the right side of the divide between healthy imposter feelings (or ‘growth moments’) and imposter syndrome?
 
Talk about it!
It is astonishing how many scientists suffer in silence about the same problems! Imposter syndrome is one of the most common in my experience. The number of rejected papers, job applications and grants we all get is a good example. I’ve lost track of all my own failures, but I have definitely notched over 50 grant rejections, and I know this is not unusual. Some people have gone further and published their CV of failures. Sharing such information can be surprisingly therapeutic both to the person sharing and the reader. It  destroys damaging myths about other people and stops us feeling we need to pretend to be something we are not.
 
Dismiss the dismissive
Some people in research life can be unhelpfully dismissive of others. Perhaps it helps them feel better about themselves through unnecessary comparison, but we do not have to accept their view. This can range from a reviewer who calls a PhD student's three years of sound but not yet groundbreaking research in a manuscript 'speculative', ‘incremental’ or ‘preliminary’ to the person who once  - and this really is a true story - told me: “But there are lots of professors in Cambridge!”. We always need see these comments for what they are: one person’s carelessly worded opinion that tells us more about them than us.

Celebrate!
We need to remember our successes, not just our failures. We need to work particularly hard at this because evolution wired us up to focus on negatives. Each week we can take the time to review what we have done, not just what remains to be done. It is important to celebrate major wins with colleagues too, and reciprocate in celebrating theirs – our papers, qualifications, new jobs, even nice results in the lab. This is because sharing experiences with others deepens the emotional impact, making it more memorable.
 
We need to appreciate what we do know, and how far we have come, not just focus on what we don't yet know - the gain, not the gap! Everyone has gaps: we each have our different patch of knowledge. Appreciating this also helps us communicate more effectively across the divide to other disciplines, while making sure we do not confuse specialisation with lack of expertise when we listen to others.
 
Communicate clearly
Emotions are contagious so one of the best ways to avoid imposter syndrome in ourselves is to avoid provoking it in someone else. We can do this by explaining our own work clearly and without jargon so that people specialised in other topics can understand it quickly and easily. Most people will then reciprocate so everyone benefits. Communicating as clearly as possible, whether in writing or verbally also helps us figure out for ourselves what we truly understand and what needs a little more work. To do this well, we need to be aware of the ‘curse of knowledge’, which is closely linked to being highly specialised. This is where we think we have explained something well but have missed crucial basic explanations that people with other specialities need to understand us. Inviting, and listening to honest feedback helps here.
 
Don’t accept anyone else’s imposter feelings
If you compare yourself with someone who projects confidence while lacking substance, it is natural to feel inferior. We don’t have to do this to ourselves! The key is to avoid blaming our own apparent lack of knowledge while overlooking theirs.

​You’re normal!
Imposter feelings then are near universal and helpful as long as we manage them well. Research life has many challenges that evoke them. Imposter syndrome is more harmful. We slip into it when tired or under stress, but we can learn to manage how we respond to our emotions to minimise its effect.  
 
The best way to stop imposter feelings slipping into imposter syndrome is to realise how universal they are!