Who Qualifies as an “Expert” And How Can We Decide Who Is Trustworthy?

Discerning a real expert from a charlatan is crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
This article is part of the magazine, "The Future of Science In America: The Election Issue," co-published by LeapsMag, the Aspen Institute Science & Society Program, and GOOD.
Expertise is a slippery concept. Who has it, who claims it, and who attributes or yields it to whom is a culturally specific, sociological process. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed a remarkable emergence of legitimate and not-so-legitimate scientists publicly claiming or being attributed to have academic expertise in precisely my field: infectious disease epidemiology. From any vantage point, it is clear that charlatans abound out there, garnering TV coverage and hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers based on loud opinions despite flimsy credentials. What is more interesting as an insider is the gradient of expertise beyond these obvious fakers.
A person's expertise is not a fixed attribute; it is a hierarchical trait defined relative to others. Despite my protestations, I am the go-to expert on every aspect of the pandemic to my family. To a reporter, I might do my best to answer a question about the immune response to SARS-CoV-2, noting that I'm not an immunologist. Among other academic scientists, my expertise is more well-defined as a subfield of epidemiology, and within that as a particular area within infectious disease epidemiology. There's a fractal quality to it; as you zoom in on a particular subject, a differentiation of expertise emerges among scientists who, from farther out, appear to be interchangeable.
We all have our scientific domain and are less knowledgeable outside it, of course, and we are often asked to comment on a broad range of topics. But many scientists without a track record in the field have become favorites among university administrators, senior faculty in unrelated fields, policymakers, and science journalists, using institutional prestige or social connections to promote themselves. This phenomenon leads to a distorted representation of science—and of academic scientists—in the public realm.
Trustworthy experts will direct you to others in their field who know more about particular topics, and will tend to be honest about what is and what isn't "in their lane."
Predictably, white male voices have been disproportionately amplified, and men are certainly over-represented in the category of those who use their connections to inappropriately claim expertise. Generally speaking, we are missing women, racial minorities, and global perspectives. This is not only important because it misrepresents who scientists are and reinforces outdated stereotypes that place white men in the Global North at the top of a credibility hierarchy. It also matters because it can promote bad science, and it passes over scientists who can lend nuance to the scientific discourse and give global perspectives on this quintessentially global crisis.
Also at work, in my opinion, are two biases within academia: the conflation of institutional prestige with individual expertise, and the bizarre hierarchy among scientists that attributes greater credibility to those in quantitative fields like physics. Regardless of mathematical expertise or institutional affiliation, lack of experience working with epidemiological data can lead to over-confidence in the deceptively simple mathematical models that we use to understand epidemics, as well as the inappropriate use of uncertain data to inform them. Prominent and vocal scientists from different quantitative fields have misapplied the methods of infectious disease epidemiology during the COVID-19 pandemic so far, creating enormous confusion among policymakers and the public. Early forecasts that predicted the epidemic would be over by now, for example, led to a sense that epidemiological models were all unreliable.
Meanwhile, legitimate scientific uncertainties and differences of opinion, as well as fundamentally different epidemic dynamics arising in diverse global contexts and in different demographic groups, appear in the press as an indistinguishable part of this general chaos. This leads many people to question whether the field has anything worthwhile to contribute, and muddies the facts about COVID-19 policies for reducing transmission that most experts agree on, like wearing masks and avoiding large indoor gatherings.
So how do we distinguish an expert from a charlatan? I believe a willingness to say "I don't know" and to openly describe uncertainties, nuances, and limitations of science are all good signs. Thoughtful engagement with questions and new ideas is also an indication of expertise, as opposed to arrogant bluster or a bullish insistence on a particular policy strategy regardless of context (which is almost always an attempt to hide a lack of depth of understanding). Trustworthy experts will direct you to others in their field who know more about particular topics, and will tend to be honest about what is and what isn't "in their lane." For example, some expertise is quite specific to a given subfield: epidemiologists who study non-infectious conditions or nutrition, for example, use different methods from those of infectious disease experts, because they generally don't need to account for the exponential growth that is inherent to a contagion process.
Academic scientists have a specific, technical contribution to make in containing the COVID-19 pandemic and in communicating research findings as they emerge. But the liminal space between scientists and the public is subject to the same undercurrents of sexism, racism, and opportunism that society and the academy have always suffered from. Although none of the proxies for expertise described above are fool-proof, they are at least indicative of integrity and humility—two traits the world is in dire need of at this moment in history.
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"Making Sense of Science" is a monthly podcast that features interviews with leading medical and scientific experts about the latest developments and the big ethical and societal questions they raise. This episode is hosted by science and biotech journalist Emily Mullin, summer editor of the award-winning science outlet Leaps.org.
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Meet the Psychologist Using Psychedelics to Treat Racial Trauma
Monnica Williams was stuck. The veteran psychologist wanted to conduct a study using psychedelics, but her university told her they didn't have the expertise to evaluate it via an institutional review board, which is responsible for providing ethical and regulatory oversight for research that involves human participants. Instead, they directed her to a hospital, whose reviewers turned it down, citing research of a banned substance as unethical.
"I said, 'We're not using illegal psilocybin, we're going through Health Canada,'" Williams said. Psilocybin was banned in Canada in 1974, but can now be obtained with an exemption from Health Canada, the federal government's health policy department. After learning this, the hospital review board told Williams they couldn't review her proposal because she's not affiliated with the hospital, after all.
It's all part of balancing bureaucracy with research goals for Williams, a leading expert on racial trauma and psychedelic medicine, as well as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), at the University of Ottawa. She's exploring the use of hallucinogenic substances like MDMA and psilocybin — commonly known as ecstasy and magic mushrooms, respectively — to help people of color address the psychological impacts of systemic racism. A prolific researcher, Williams also works as an expert witness, offering clinical evaluations for racial trauma cases.
Scientists have long known that psychedelics produce an altered state of consciousness and openness to new perspectives. For people with mental health conditions who haven't benefited from traditional therapy, psychedelics may be able to help them discover what's causing their pain or trauma, including racial trauma—the mental and emotional injury spurred by racial bias.
"Using psychedelics can not only bring these pain points to the surface for healing, but can reduce the anxiety or response to these memories and allow them to speak openly about them without the pain they bring," Williams says. Her research harnesses the potential of psychedelics to increase neuroplasticity, which includes the brain's ability to build new pathways.
"People of color are dealing with racism all the time, in large and small ways, and even dealing with racism in healthcare, even dealing with racism in therapy."
But she says therapists of color aren't automatically equipped to treat racial trauma. First, she notes, people of color are "vastly underrepresented in the mental health workforce." This is doubly true in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, in which a person is guided through a psychedelic session by a therapist or team of therapists, then processes the experience in subsequent therapy sessions.
"On top of that, the therapists of color are getting the same training that the white therapists are getting, so it's not even really guaranteed that they're going to be any better at helping a person that may have racial trauma emerging as part of their experience," she says.
In her own training to become a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia, Williams says she was taught "how to be a great psychologist for white people." Yet even people of color, she argues, need specialized training to work with marginalized groups, particularly when it comes to MDMA, psilocybin and other psychedelics. Because these drugs can lower natural psychological defense mechanisms, Williams says, it's important for providers to be specially trained.
"People of color are dealing with racism all the time, in large and small ways, and even dealing with racism in healthcare, even dealing with racism in therapy. So [they] generally develop a lot of defenses and coping strategies to ward off racism so that they can function." she says. This is particularly true with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy: "One possibility is that you're going to be stripped of your defenses, you're going to be vulnerable. And so you have to work with a therapist who is going to understand that and not enact more racism in their work with you."
Williams has struggled to find funding and institutional approval for research involving psychedelics, or funding for investigations into racial trauma or the impacts of conditions like OCD and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in people of color. With the bulk of her work focusing on OCD, she hoped to focus on people of color, but found there was little funding for that type of research. In 2020, that started to change as structural racism garnered more media attention.
After the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, by a white police officer in May 2020, Williams was flooded with media requests. "Usually, when something like that happens, I get contacted a lot for a couple of weeks, and it dies off. But after George Floyd, it just never did."
Monnica Williams, clinical psychologist at the University of Ottawa
Williams was no stranger to the questions that soon blazed across headlines: How can we mitigate microaggressions? How do race and ethnicity impact mental health? What terms should we use to discuss racial issues? What constitutes an ally, and why aren't there more of them? Why aren't there more people of color in academia, and so many other fields?
Now, she's hoping that the increased attention on racial justice will mean more acceptance for the kind of research she's doing.
In fact, Williams herself has used psychedelics in order to gain a better understanding of how to use them to treat racial trauma. In a study published in January, she and two other Black female psychotherapists took MDMA in a supervised setting, guided by a team of mental health practitioners who helped them process issues that came up as the session progressed. Williams, who was also the study's lead author, found that participants' experiences centered around processing and finding release from racial identities, and, in one case, of simply feeling wholly human without the burden of racial identity for the first time.
The purpose of the study was twofold: to understand how Black women react to psychedelics and to provide safe, firsthand, psychedelic experiences to Black mental health practitioners. One of the other study participants has since gone on to offer psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy to her own patients.
Psychedelic research, and psilocybin in particular, has become a hot topic of late, particularly after Oregon became the first state to legalize it for therapeutic use last November. A survey-based, observational study with 313 participants, published in 2020, paved the way for Williams' more recent MDMA experiments by describing improvements in depression, anxiety and racial trauma among people of color who had used LSD, psilocybin or MDMA in a non-research setting.
Williams and her team included only respondents who reported a moderate to strong psychoactive effect of past psychedelic consumption and believed these experiences provided "relief from the challenging effects of ethnic discrimination." Participants reported a memorable psychedelic experience as well as its acute and lasting effects, completing assessments of psychological insight, mystical experience and emotional challenges experienced during psychedelic experience, then describing their mental health — including depression, anxiety and trauma symptoms — before and after that experience.
Still, Williams says addressing racism is much more complex than treating racial trauma. "One of the questions I get asked a lot is, 'How can Black people cope with racism?' And I don't really like that question," she says. "I think it's important and I don't mind answering it, but I think the more important question is, how can we end racism? What can Black people do to stop racism that's happening to them and what can we do as a society to stop racism? And people aren't really asking this question."