In a civil society, public debate should be informed by the analyses and conclusions of its experts. But a quick survey of contemporary news reveals many examples where participants in social controversy and debate reject expert opinion or supplant it with their own flawed and incomplete perspectives. We call this phenomenon epistemic trespassing.

Trespassing heightens social disharmony and quashes valuable discussion and debate. It occurs when individuals or groups move into a debate assuming self-expertise they do not have. Sometimes, experts from one field themselves trespassing on another field, when they make claims beyond their actual expertise or training. Other times, untrained novices claim knowledge about a field they altogether lack.

Our research will examine trespassing from both descriptive and normative perspectives. We will illuminate the nature of trespassing, its normative problems, and methods for mitigating it.

On the descriptive side, Dunning will extend his ongoing studies on the identification, acceptance, and rejection of expert opinion.

More specifically, previous research has shown that trespassing is often inspired by ideology, but fueled by other psychological circumstances: subjective expertise (one?s overall sense that one is an expert), objective world knowledge (the specific factual beliefs and arguments people use to make sense of a topic), and distrust in experts (the perception that experts harbor ulterior motives). We hypothesize that all of these factors predict trespassing.

In additional studies, Dunning will strive to prevent excessive trespassing by confronting participants? confidence in their knowledge; namely, their misconceptions as well as their subjective expertise, using principles derived from Ballantine?s work plus others suggested by recent psychological research. We predict that subjecting participants to careful epistemic challenges will render them more receptive to expert opinion.

On the normative side, Ballantyne will develop new lines of philosophical research on normative problems for trespassing novices and experts as well as epistemological issues concerning the proper identification of expertise.

Trespassers hold views on matters beyond their ken, rebuffing the actual experts? opinions. Plausibly, we should sometimes harshly judge the trespassers? behavior. But what are the specific normative errors that trespassers commit? Ballantyne will analyze a range of commonplace cases of trespassing using normative theories from contemporary epistemology. He will describe a variety of shortcomings characterizing trespassers? judgments and intellectual characters, while examining the viability of alleged defenses for trespassing behavior.

He will also consider expert trespassing, arguably increasingly commonplace in contemporary interdisciplinary research, given the complexity of the intellectual world and the vast range of information bearing on important questions.

In his research, Ballantyne will draw upon recent work by Dunning and others showing that identifying experts can become an intrinsically difficult task, with true expertise often hiding in plain sight. People suffer severe trouble recognizing expertise that outstrips their own. Addressing such limitations can inform normative accounts of general requirements for successfully recognizing expertise.

For public outreach, the research team proposes a podcast series featuring researchers from all three phases of the Intellectual Humility work sponsored by Templeton, as well as general interest articles.