“I Did My Own Research” Is Usually Just Confirmation Bias With Extra Steps

There’s a phrase that gets thrown around a lot: “I did my own research.” And honestly? It sounds responsible. It sounds like you’re not just blindly following what someone told you. It sounds like you’re thinking for yourself.

But there’s a problem.

Research published in peer-reviewed psychology journals has found that people who loudly claim to have “done their own research” tend to score higher in overconfidence — meaning they think they understand complex topics better than they actually do. And that overconfidence is directly linked to having trouble telling the difference between real science and pseudoscience, the stuff that just sounds like science but isn’t.

So what’s actually happening when most people “do their research”?

Usually it goes like this: you already have a feeling about something. Maybe someone told you vaccines cause problems, or that some food is secretly dangerous, or that some big institution is hiding the truth. Then you open Google, type in something like “proof that [thing you already believe]” — and Google, being very good at its job, finds you exactly that. You read the results that match what you were already thinking. You stop looking. And then you tell people you looked it up.

That’s not research. That’s confirmation bias with a search engine attached.

Confirmation bias is the brain’s tendency to look for, notice, and remember information that supports what you already believe — and to ignore or dismiss information that doesn’t. It’s not a flaw in bad thinkers. It’s a feature of all human brains. Even smart people do it constantly. The difference is whether you know it’s happening.

Actual research — the kind scientists and journalists and investigators do — works the opposite way. You start with a question you genuinely don’t know the answer to. You look for sources that disagree with each other and try to figure out which one holds up. You update your belief based on what you find, even if what you find is inconvenient. You don’t stop looking just because you found something you liked.

The internet makes this worse because it makes the fake version feel indistinguishable from the real version. Reading a few Reddit posts and a blog written by someone with no credentials in the field genuinely feels the same as reading a study. As one science writer put it, at-your-fingertips searches have turned a huge chunk of the population into people who confuse “I looked it up” with “I know this.” Wikipedia can be a starting point. A Google search can point you somewhere useful. But neither one is a destination.

None of this means you should just trust everything authorities tell you without question. Healthy skepticism is good. Asking “how do we know this?” is a great habit. But the answer to “I’m not sure if this is true” isn’t “I’ll find sources that agree with me until I feel certain.” That’s the trap.

The real move is slower and a little less comfortable: look for the strongest version of the argument you’re skeptical of, not the weakest. Check who wrote something and whether they have relevant expertise. Notice when a source has something to gain from you believing it. And stay genuinely open to being wrong — because being wrong and then correcting yourself is how anyone actually learns anything.

“I did my own research” can mean something real. It just usually doesn’t.