Verified by 
At 2:51 a.m. today, I made my first mistake. After waking up, I reached for my phone. By 3 a.m., I had made my second mistake. I was reading the comments on a friend’s thread about the COVID vaccine on a social networking website. An overwhelming percentage of the comments were positive. But there were a few that pushed me right over the edge.
For months now, I’ve been hemming and hawing about getting my act together to write up some posts about basic scientific reasoning. I’ve seen too many people throw their hands up and say, “I just don’t know what to think,” or “I just don’t know who to believe anymore.” This is not acceptable. Most of us have been well educated with the basic tools we need to handle the information coming at us. We don’t have to be experts on everything, but we should put our education and brains to good use. Most of the things people are avoiding making decisions about are just not that difficult.
The problem: People are known to be cognitive misers, to take mental shortcuts to avoid thinking whenever possible. My goal with this series is to help you remember your science roots. I’m not talking about the scientific facts you memorized in school, I’m talking about the scientific reasoning your teachers and professors were trying to instill in you. To remind you that thinking through things is not as difficult as some people make it out to be and to give you the confidence to be a good scientific consumer.
Each post, I’ll break down a scientific rule—one that’s actually generally well-agreed upon. I’ll explain that rule, talk about how that rule contributes to less engagement in scientific reasoning, and give you a simple solution (one that will usually involve remembering to use your brain).
So here we go. My friend’s friend said, in her comment about getting (or not getting) a COVID vaccine: “I am still on the fence about it. Need to see more of the positive and negative regarding the vaccines.”
With this comment, the person is saying "there must be two sides to this issue." It suggests an assumption that if there is a "very good" there must be an equal and opposite "very bad" waiting to be discovered.
Just because we should consider both the "good" and the "bad" does not mean they exist in equal amounts.
The Rule: There are two sides to every issue.
I spend most of my career as a science educator training students to see how everything is more complex than we realize. A lot of people apply this rule to opinions. But even in science, which is supposed to be more about fact than opinion, there are two sides to every decision you make. Every decision that goes into a research design carries with it some advantages and some costs. You cannot run the perfect study. To make something externally valid (i.e., a lot like the real world), you might have to sacrifice some precision or experimental control. To get experimental control, you might have to change a situation so much it isn’t realistic. Every researcher doing science everywhere is making these sorts of decisions. There are two sides to every issue.
The Catch: Not every side is equal.
Just because there are no perfect studies does not mean there are not better studies. The point of in-depth scientific training is to learn to identify all of the costs and all of the benefits of every decision so that you can weigh them against each other and make a careful decision. You don’t see scientists throwing their hands up and saying, "Oh well, there are two sides to this so I guess I can’t do my job!" Instead, scientists learn to recognize which benefits are the most important and which costs are the least important. We learn to consider the scientific literature as a whole to determine which costs and benefits are accumulating and where there are significant gaps. We learn which downsides can be addressed in follow-up studies and we find unaddressed gaps in prior research to counter with new research. We make our careers by wading through the pros and cons and making decisions.
You might not be a scientist (or maybe you are!) but if you are reading this page, you are definitely a consumer of science. You regularly have to consider the scientific evidence for or against an idea, finding, or medical procedure. If you stick too diligently to the rule that there are "two sides to everything," you might become blind to the quality of the arguments on either side.
There’s a classic research study in social psychology that shows people are influenced by argument quantity instead of argument quality when they aren’t really paying attention. When you find yourself thinking there are two sides to every issue and you can’t sort them out, there’s a decent chance that for whatever reason, you’re not as engaged in thinking through the issue as you need to be. You might end up thinking that those two sides must be equally important.
The Solution: There are two sides to every issue but that doesn’t mean both sides have equal merit.
My response to my friend’s friend (which I miraculously managed to refrain from posting on her thread) was this: Sometimes there are goods and bads and sometimes there are goods and neutrals. This is a clear case where you don't need to treat sides equally.
There may be goods on both sides of an issue; there may be bads on both sides of an issue. There may be a lot of unknowns on all fronts on an issue, but those unknowns are probably not equal. We can throw our hands up in the air or we can remember to use our brains.
In that same study, the researchers found that when people are invested in their thinking, they aren’t so persuaded by quantity but they focus on quality. So there’s hope. You can sort through the two sides.
It’s going to take a good bit of practice to get out of the habit of thinking both sides have equal merit. My challenge for you is this: Notice yourself thinking or saying it. When you hear others say it, pause. Remind yourself that just because both sides have arguments does not mean they have equal merit. As you do, you'll gain the experience you need to identify which side actually is stronger, and which unknowns should matter more.
References
Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1984). The effects of involvement on responses to argument quantity and quality: Central and peripheral routes to persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(1), 69–81. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.46.1.69
Kool, W., McGuire, J. T., Rosen, Z. B., & Botvinick, M. M. (2010). Decision making and the avoidance of cognitive demand. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139(4), 665–682. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020198
Pedhazur, E. J., & Schmelkin, L. P. (2013). Measurement, design, and analysis: An integrated approach. psychology press.
Adriaanse, M. A., Gollwitzer, P. M., De Ridder, D. T., De Wit, J. B., & Kroese, F. M. (2011). Breaking habits with implementation intentions: A test of underlying processes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(4), 502-513.
