Don’t believe everything you think!

​When did you last compare yourself with someone else? Five minutes ago? Ten? Be honest! If you think you’ve not done it today, did you just wake up or did you not notice?
 
Now think about how you design a good experiment. If you work with patients, you would never compare questionnaire-based data from one group with biomarker measurements of another, would you? Or in cell culture experiments, would you compare micrographs from the test condition with western blots from controls? Of course not! No scientist would ever base conclusions on two unmatched datasets, would we?
 
Except when we do! When we compare our own presentation with the next speaker’s, this is exactly what we do, comparing our feelings with their outward appearance. We cannot see how we appear to others and we know next to nothing about their feelings.
 
We also do it when we compare our worth as a scientist with the person who just landed the job we applied for. We consider our latest rejection along with the battle scars of all our previous ones, while knowing nothing about their rejected applications which could even outnumber ours. Negativity bias adds yet more fuel to the fire. So much for matched datasets and logical thinking!

​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?

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