Do ‘Armchair Experts’ Undermine Trust in Professionals and Institutions?

What lies behind this fundamental shift away from the trust we place in well-established experts?

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

The world is awash with information: 24-hour news cycles, podcasts, blog posts, such as Medium and Substack, and Petabytes of video streaming data, endlessly flowing into the neuronal mass that occupies the space between our ears.

Armed with this plethora of facts, figures, theories, and conjecture, we take up arms and rise up from our creaking armchairs, fully equipped for Monday morning combat at the water cooler, lunch room, café, front bar or bridge meeting, AKA, Monday’s experts.

This, of course, is all part of being human and maintaining a social persona. I recently wrote an article about gossip and the startling figure that around two-thirds of human conversation is centred around gossip. This is seen across cultures and has likely been the case since we could string a few words together.

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Nonetheless, at no point in our history have we been able to access the vast repository of information with a single touch on the smartphone most of us carry.

Armed with this miraculous technology, one might assume we have all become ‘experts.’

Australia still retains a wonderful public broadcaster in the ABC, free from adverts, albeit somewhat left-leaning. A program recently aired that covered an intriguing subject I had not considered before. Titled If You’re Listening, the episode was How QAnon and Epstein blew up the justice system.

The episode traces the rise of QAnon and its inauspicious beginnings as a lark on 4chan, and then follows the leaking and eventual release of the Epstein files. I’m no expert on any of these subjects, so I’ll duck and weave from that one.

The premise of the show centred around the rise of so-called experts, influencers, social commentators, and conspiracy peddlers who fundamentally shifted public opinion on a range of issues. From a cabal of satanic, cannibalistic paedophiles who run the deep state, to hacked emails and the Pizzagate scandal of 2016.

The Epstein files revealed the vast extent to which the elites and upper echelons of the world, at some point in time, rubbed shoulders with a convicted sex offender. All manner of conspiracies has emerged from the leaking of emails and other information, fundamentally eroding trust in the systems governments have in place to enforce and maintain law, maintain stability, and protect their citizens.

The rise and rise of armchair experts, replete with the vast ocean of knowledge bestowed upon them by somewhat questionable sources, have armed themselves with pitchforks and burning torches, not only ready to storm the Bastille, but having to some degree, already accomplished it with the January 6 attack on the US Capitol in 2021.

What lies behind this fundamental shift away from the trust we place in well-established experts?

The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines an expert as “having, involving, or displaying special skill or knowledge derived from training or experience.” Conversely, an armchair expert is an idiom that describes someone who offers detailed opinions or advice on a topic, despite having no hands-on experience or professional qualifications in that field.

Defined Experts

Let’s examine some fields of expertise to establish what might constitute an expert.

Most people are familiar with an MD or “medical doctor.” Becoming a practitioner typically requires a 3–4-year bachelor’s degree, a further 4 years of medical school, and several years of internship, representing an 11–16-year investment and often substantial debt.

An epidemiologist may spend around 5–6 years to attain entry-level qualifications and further years of research to become an expert.

Psychology requires five years of university study and a one-year internship in Australia, with a slightly longer pathway in the US. A psychiatrist typically requires a full medical degree, an internship, and often a further three years of training.

Then there are other experts, people who may not have taken the academic road, but nonetheless are experts in their field through apprenticeships, studying under a qualified master, or simply devoting a good deal of their lives to a limited field.

Take French furniture polishing, for example; it can take up to a decade to master this technique. Japanese sushi chefs mastering the craft may spend a decade simply perfecting knife cuts, and French croissant makers, such as the famous Du Pain et des Idées bakery in Paris, may take 5–10 years to reach mastery.

On the other hand, an armchair expert may have gained their information from a variety of sources, albeit predominantly surface-level information, often from people who are far removed from being experts.

And yet, there is nothing overtly wrong with being an armchair expert. It is often fun to banter with friends and family about a subject we read on a website or heard on a podcast and ‘chew the fat’ over the details.

However, social media allows us to broadcast and amplify those views to a much wider and more diverse audience, including some online friends and others complete strangers. Before long, we might find ourselves arguing with someone named Dave in Alaska, about evidence that JFK is still alive and runs a cat orphanage in Nepal.

A New Clear and Present Danger

And yet beyond the scourge of amplified social media armchair experts, a new and ominous threat lurks in the shadows. The spreading use of so-called AI-slopaganda, disinformation campaigns utilising AI chatbots to attack institutions, individuals, and experts.

As I was writing this article, a story landed on Australian news on this very subject. The article discusses the growing risk of AI spreading disinformation through toxic campaigns, which are eroding trust in institutions and experts. For example, Astroturfing, in which organisations create the illusion of grassroots support for a cause, such as promoting meat consumption or climate change denial, is heavily entrenched on social media platforms, often driven entirely by algorithms.

Such astroturfing campaigns not only erode trust but also target political organisations, thereby further undermining trust in political figures, voter confidence and social cohesion. The article concludes with a transcript of a Senate committee hearing where Karl Kruszelnicki or ‘Dr. Karl’, one of Australia’s most celebrated science communicators, attempts to establish facts with a right-leaning Senator.

According to the article (1):

“Dr. Karl: Do you agree that the climate records show that the last 10 years have been the hottest on record worldwide?

“Senator: The last 10 years in Australia have been cooler than the 1880s and 1890s in Australia.

“Dr. Karl: Hang on … Worldwide. Do you agree that the last 10 years have been the hottest years on record worldwide?

“Senator: No I don’t.

“Dr. Karl: I feel like I’m talking to a school child who says seven times two is not 14, but instead seven times two is a bicycle divided by the square root of a banana.

“Senator: That’s one way of making out that I’m a fool.

“Dr. Karl: But all the scientists disagree with you. 99.999 per cent of the scientists disagree with you.

“Senator: So now you’re into consensus, which is a political tool.

“Dr. Karl: Hang on, consensus is a political tool? … So if all the scientists agree that seven times two is 14, that’s a political tool?

“Senator: That’s obviously a stupid comment, in my opinion.”

Misinformation is not just seeping into our watercooler discourse; it’s tearing at the very fabric of our society.

Armchair experts, orchestrated AI-slopaganda and astroturfing are influencing not just individuals, but political organisations, voter preferences, views on the climate, vaccines and health.

The Psychology Behind Misinformation

What do science and psychology have to say about misinformation and false beliefs?

Highly controversial topics such as COVID-19, vaccinations, politics, and religion often evoke polarising and divisive responses. When we hold strong beliefs about a subject, especially with a significant emotional component, we have tendency to arc up and attempt to defend our position.

Vaccines and autism are one such example. Highly polarising and emotive, where people held strong, unwavering views on the subject.

When challenged on those views, people tend to seek out confirming information to fortify their position and prove, “See, I was right!” rather than to disprove ideas. This is known as Confirmation bias. (2) Similarly, Myside bias suggests that we closely attend to information that aligns with our existing attitudes and beliefs.

As armchair experts gather to confirm similar ideas around vaccines and autism, they further confirm their biases. This can become an ‘echo chamber’ in which only people with the same beliefs express their opinions, further solidifying the idea that ‘we were right all along.’

Illusory correlations are the false belief that a relationship between two things exists, even when it is weak or non-existent. (3) Autism symptoms often emerge around the same time as childhood vaccinations, which leads people to the false belief that there was a relationship between the two, an illusory correlation.

When Andrew Wakefield published his paper in The Lancet in 1998, suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, the internet lit up. Yet despite the paper being retracted and discredited, the rumour mills kept churning. Confirmation bias and echo chambers would have amplified and further spread misinformation, leading to a distrust in real experts.

Epidemiologists, virologists, and immunologists who had spent decades honing their craft were suddenly persona non grata.

In 1973, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman described the availability heuristic, whereby we tend to make ‘mental shortcuts,’ judging the frequency or probability of an event, simply based on how easily examples come to mind. (4)

Online communities of parents who believed their children’s symptoms followed vaccination likely drew some comfort from the study, which falsely appeared to provide a causal explanation for their child’s condition. Mentally recalling stories splashed across the media at the time sowed the seeds for the availability heuristic to take effect. Over time, beliefs are further solidified by influencers and social commentators, who lack actual expert knowledge.

When the study was retracted, and the experts weighed in, cognitive dissonance likely arose among many who believed the vaccine-autism link. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort experienced when holding two conflicting beliefs simultaneously. (5) Having expert evaluations discredit the flawed study removed the certainty that X caused Y, likely leading to conflicting feelings: the false information provides comfort, while the new information causes greater distress.

Another heuristic, or mental shortcut, we often employ is the representativeness heuristic. When making rapid decisions or judgments about events, it is less cognitively expensive to categorise the event according to existing mental schemas than to engage in more effortful analytical reasoning.

For example, when a child is exposed to another child with influenza, they develop influenza symptoms within a short time: a straightforward cause-and-effect relationship. When the child has the MMR vaccine, and within a short space of time, autism symptoms arise = cause and effect based on placing the event in the category of ‘how sickness happens.’ This reflects a reliance on perceived pattern similarity rather than on statistical or scientific evidence.

Tversky and Kahneman conducted an experiment in 1974 in which they posed the following question about a randomly selected male from the US population: “The male named Robert, who wears glasses, reads a lot, and speaks quietly.” Is Robert a farmer or a librarian?

Most people guess librarian. However, in 1974, there were way more male farmers than male librarians! What happened? We tend to form ‘schemas,’ fast cognitive templates that fill in missing details based on past experiences. Most people’s idea of a librarian fits the ‘wears glasses, reads a lot and speaks quietly’ schema.

This illustrates a violation of the conjunction rule, part of probability theory, which states that the probability of the conjunction of two events [A AND B] (two things happening together) can never exceed the probability of a single event occurring alone [A OR B]. For example, the probability of both vaccination (high) AND autism (low) can never be greater than vaccines alone or autism alone.

So, a person hears about a healthy child who received the MMR vaccine and later developed autism and assumes the vaccine is the cause. However, the probability of this relationship is highly unlikely. The availability heuristic, “I remember reading yesterday about a child with autism from vaccines,” combined with the representativeness heuristic, “The timeline fits my existing schema of how sickness happens,” leads to the illusory correlation that “vaccines cause autism.”

One more psychological factor to throw into the mix: the Dunning-Kruger effect. This cognitive bias was proposed by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999 and has become the stuff of folklore. Essentially, the effect describes the tendency of individuals with lower competence to overestimate their abilities; that is, they lack skill and are unaware of their incompetence.

Some criticised the theory, suggesting statistical artifacts may be responsible for the observed results. In 2021, Jansen et al. ran two large-scale studies to replicate the findings. (6) They found support for the Dunning-Kruger effect, confirming that not only do people who perform poorly on certain tasks lack skills, but also the ability to accurately assess how well they performed, a single limiting factor: being bad at the task and bad at recognising that fact.

The case of Joe

We now have enough information to create a hypothetical armchair expert, we’ll call him Joe (apologies to anyone with that name!). One day, Joe is browsing his favourite internet sites and comes across an article that headlines “World leaders soon to reveal themselves as lizard people from planet Zargon.”

Photo by Steven HWG on Unsplash

Joe recalls watching a YouTube video that showed many of the 60 heads of state at Davos, Switzerland, blinking in a decidedly reptilian fashion. “There’s something in that”, thought Joe, having recently seen a documentary on iguanas (availability heuristic), and recognised that iguana-like blink in the leaders. This almost certainly indicates that these leading figures are lizard people impostors (illusory correlation).

Over a few beers, Joe tells Hank about the lizard blink leaders, and Hank calls bullshit on that one. Undeterred, Joe doubles down on his belief (cognitive dissonance) and spends hours researching sites on UFO abductions, lizard people and alien anal probes. Joe builds rapport with fellow online believers in the chatroom, who all agree on the lizard blink and Davos theory (both reflecting confirmation bias and groupthink).

Joe later reads a news story that a bunch of scientists have debunked the lizard people/ iguana eye blink phenomenon, explaining it was a glitch in the video taken at Davos. Joe has shot hours of home videos on his camcorder and knows a glitch when he sees it. The experts don’t know what they’re talking about (Dunning-Kruger), and it’s more likely they are lizard people than just a glitch (conjunction rule).

Intently studying the video of the leaders, Joe recognises the emotionless, hard stare, the lizard-like blink, and the cold, reptilian nature of these leaders. This definitely fits the archetype of lizard people (representativeness heuristic). Joe concludes this must all be a conspiracy to cover up the activities of these reptile rascals, leading to their ultimate goal of world domination.

Okay, a ridiculous example, but cast your mind back to the last time you heard a Monday’s expert rehashing the news, sport or events of the preceding week. Did you notice elements of Dunning-Kruger, talking about subjects with authority they clearly knew little about?

Perhaps when questioned, they doubled down on their beliefs, citing additional examples that came to mind and quoting armchair experts’ musings.

In Conclusion

We all use cognitive biases and heuristics in everyday life; they are crucial evolutionary adaptations that enable rapid, intuitive decision-making based on experience.

Unfortunately, these heuristics are often hacked by conspiracy hawkers, pseudo-science quacks, mystical spirit peddlers and health and wellness gurus. They attempt to convince us of their unique access to secret information, gleaned from intuition, spiritual guidance, or internet ‘research.’ They hawk their wares to all and sundry, discrediting the experts, muddying the waters and blurring the lines between facts and fantasy.

Often, the truth is either ordinary and mundane or unpalatable and unpleasant. Armchair experts sensationalise complicated, mundane or unpleasant truths and twist them into something more palatable, often creating a marketable commodity that undermines the authority of those who can truly differentiate between fact and fiction.

Recognising the warning signs that someone has fallen for these cognitive biases or is attempting to hijack our susceptibility to various heuristics and logical fallacies can empower us to make decisions based on reasoning and logic. Sometimes the right thing to do is often the hardest, overriding our biological impulses and emotions: more frontal cortex and less limbic system!

Once you begin to identify these biases and heuristics we all use, it makes it much easier to sort the wheat from the chaff, work out who’s the expert and who is simply ‘talking through their hat!’

Of course, even experts are fallible, are influenced by institutions and sometimes make mistakes, but when a room full of experts agrees on the same thing, it’s a good idea to take notice.

References

1. Hutchens G. ABC News. [Online].; 2025 [cited 2025 Feb 19. Available from: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-19/climate-disinformation-senate-committee-dr-karl-atlas-network/106350002.
2. Evans JSBT. Reasoning, Biases and Dual Processes: The Lasting Impact of Wason (1960). Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 2016; 69(10): p. 2076–2092.
3. Chapman LJ, Chapman JP. Illusory correlation as an obstacle to the use of valid psychodiagnostic signs. Journal of Abnormal Psychology. 1969; 74(3): p. 271–280.
4. Tversky A, Kahneman D. Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology. 1973; 5(2): p. 207–232.
5. Festinger L. A theory of cognitive dissonance. Evanston,IL: RowPeterson.; 1957.
6. Jansen RA, Rafferty AN, Griffiths TL. A rational model of the Dunning–Kruger effect supports insensitivity to evidence in low performers. Nature Human Behaviour. 2021; 5(6): p. 756–763.