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What's so important about evidence?

The first few posts I'm making are to set the scene for the future of the blog and explain what I'm trying to do. In my previous post I mentioned that I will be using evidence to make suggestions,  examining IT and business practice. This post discusses why that's important to me, and why I think it should be important to you too.

We are bombarded with advice about how things should be done, from colleagues, bosses and friends. We can go out and find even more information online, from training, or in books. All of these can extremely useful, but having a reliable way of sorting out the real from the rubbish is vital.

Evidence, well deployed, can cut through uncertainty, making your actions more effective and your decisions more reliable. Poorly deployed or misinterpreted, though, it can give you false confidence and lead you astray. Being intelligent is not a protection against this risk, either, and some research suggests it even increases the capacity for self-deception. I'll be talking about biases and how these interact with evidence a lot in future posts as it's a really important lens through which to understand how we make decisions.

For me, the best way to reduce the slipperiness of evidence is to take a closer look at it. The first, most obvious way to break it down is to is differentiate between qualitative and quantitative types. Psychology is unlike most sciences in that it works with both forms of evidence extensively, though they are used for different purposes. Qualitative data focuses on the individual experience and looks at more subjective things. Quantitative data is used to come up with generalised information about large numbers of people and aims for a greater level of objectivity. Both can be extremely useful. The important thing is that the evidence is empirical and rigorous; that is, based on the real-world, well-collected and fairly presented.

Wherever evidence comes from, it is always worth remembering that it is part of a social system and has ideas embedded in it that may not be as widely applicable as they seem. I am always suspicious of sweeping statements, particularly the kind that make for good newspaper headlines (Whenever you lie, your brain adjusts to make telling bigger whoppers easier, study finds). With a bit of practice you'll be able to fine-tune your bullshit detector.

That said, one of the most important things to understand about the scientific method is that it doesn't prove anything right, only not-currently-wrong. The whole enterprise is devoted to being less-wrong about the world. Because a single piece of new evidence can completely falsify a theory (Karl Popper's Black Swan) it can never be entirely settled.

Doing research, particularly in psychology, is also a lot more untidy that most researches would have you believe. There comes a point where you've got to commit so you can say something, even if it's not perfect. There's an important message for the workplace in their too; you don't want to miss out on the opportunity to try something out because you don't have absolute certainty about the process or outcome. Sometimes giving it a go is the only way to find out. This quote, often attributed to Mark Twain, sums it up for me:

“Good judgement is the result of experience, and experience the result of bad judgement." 
So, use what you can find out wisely, but don't obsess about proving things beyond doubt. The evidence suggests that's not a great strategy.

Let me know if you want to read more about a scientific approach to critical thinking and the tools available for looking at evidence by leaving a comment below.

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