How "Do Your Own Research" Became a Slogan for Epistemic Collapse

RFK Jr. announced this week that parents should “do their own research” regarding vaccinations for their children.

Everyone should be encouraged to do their own research. It’s the only reasonable way to make informed decisions. But we all have limits—of time, knowledge, education, access to information, and cognitive capacity.

If you’ve taken a Logic course or explored the subject casually, you’ll be familiar with the appeal to authority fallacy. This fallacy warns against accepting a claim solely because it’s endorsed by a perceived expert. And in the context of formal argumentation, that’s absolutely right. However, applying this standard rigorously to everyday decision-making would require endless specialized training and unlimited time.

The reality is that no one can be an expert in everything. Even world-class specialists must rely on the authority of others for most of what they believe.

Flat-earthers often subscribe to a philosophy resembling epistemic solipsism: they trust only the knowledge they can verify themselves through direct, empirical means. (They tend to be quite poor at empirical verification, but that’s beside the point.) Taken seriously, “do your own research” demands exactly this kind of radical self-reliance. Yet, in an age where the sum of human knowledge spans everything from microbiology to macroeconomics, attempting to personally verify every complex claim is not just impractical—it’s epistemically paralyzing. Even staying informed about current events—most of which we learn through third-party reporting—would be out of reach.

So what do we actually mean when we say “do your own research”? It’s a phrase that feels empowering but lacks fixed meaning. It gestures toward autonomy, but in practice, what it demands varies dramatically depending on who says it—and what they want you to conclude.

If I told a parent to “do their own research” on childhood vaccines, what I’d likely mean is: consult a licensed pediatrician, ask questions, and follow their advice. That is, find someone who has already done the research and is qualified to interpret it. In this usage, the “research” is mostly about gaining informed trust because building the epistemic foundation to confidently go further than this would take years of education and medical training. (But if you want to do that, I encourage it! I just won’t encourage shortcuts.)

But when RFK Jr. says it, the implication is different. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is charged with guiding medical professionals and informing public health policy. What RFK is suggesting to parents is that they go outside that system—to bypass not just public institutions but their own doctors and instead “do their own research.” At that point, the phrase becomes a call to epistemic secession: a rejection of shared standards for what counts as expertise, evidence, or truth. And crucially, he’s not urging parents to pursue the education or training that would justify such a departure.

RFK knows full well that no parent is going to run randomized controlled trials or analyze p-values across meta-analyses. That may be what his words pretend to imply, but it’s clearly not what he means. What remains—ironically—is an invitation to outsource trust elsewhere: not to someone more informed, but to someone more ideologically agreeable. The suggestion feels empowering, even liberating. It offers relief from doubt and cognitive dissonance—not by resolving them, but by dissolving the standards that make them matter.

In this way, “do your own research” becomes a kind of epistemic cosplay—mimicking the gestures of rigorous inquiry without submitting to its demands. It borrows the language of science and skepticism—studies, data, critical thinking—but strips them of the institutional, methodological, and epistemic scaffolding that gives them meaning. The result is not independent thought but the performance of independence—one that flatters the believer while bypassing the uncomfortable disciplines of uncertainty, expertise, and peer review.

Worse still, this version of “do your own research” functions as a thought-terminating cliché—a short, authoritative-sounding slogan used to shut down inquiry rather than promote it. Originally cataloged by Robert Jay Lifton in his work on totalitarian thought reform, thought-terminating clichés serve to relieve the tension of cognitive dissonance by replacing complex questions with ready-made answers. In this context, “do your own research” isn’t an invitation to think more deeply—it’s a convenient way to end the conversation, to sidestep evidence, and to reassert belief without further scrutiny.

This is the paradox at the heart of many thought-terminating clichés: they feel like acts of rebellion, but they function as tools of submission. RFK’s version of “do your own research” gestures toward independence, but in practice, it often channels people toward in-group-approved sources, echo chambers, and ideology-first narratives. What masquerades as skepticism is frequently just a rebranded form of obedience—only now the authority is informal, uncredentialed, and ideologically aligned. The user feels like they’ve broken free from manipulation, but what they’ve actually done is swap one epistemic authority for another—less visible, less accountable, and far less constrained by standards of evidence.