Why We Give Experts Too Much Credit

It’s not always the advice that misleads, but the speed at which personal instincts are replaced by someone else’s certainty.

The Quiet Voice Inside

A few months ago, I found myself deep in a YouTube rabbit hole, trying to learn how to create consistent characters in Midjourney, an AI image generation tool. I stumbled across a popular video where the creator laid it all out with calm authority—explaining the exact steps, the secret phrases to use in prompts, the parameter settings, the techniques that would “guarantee” your character would stay the same across multiple images. It seemed so simple when he explained it. So obvious. I took notes. I felt excited. I was sure that with a little practice, I’d have it mastered.

But when I sat down to actually use Midjourney, things didn’t unfold the way they had in the video. The character consistency was spotty. Tiny changes in the prompts led to different faces. Sometimes following the advice made things worse, not better. At first, I assumed it was my fault. Maybe I hadn’t used the right phrasing. Maybe I had missed some small but crucial step he had mentioned in passing. I didn’t even think to question the advice itself. It didn’t occur to me that maybe, just maybe, the expert didn’t have a foolproof method either—that he was presenting something polished and simple because it worked sometimes, or because it worked in the carefully chosen examples he showed.

Looking back, I realize what stayed with me wasn't just the frustration of it not working. It was the way I had silenced my own instincts—the small voice inside that had noticed how neat it all seemed, how conveniently it fit together—and deferred completely to the confidence of someone else.

This article isn’t about distrusting experts. It’s not a rant against advice, YouTube, or even Midjourney. It’s about the much quieter, more personal experience of what happens inside us when we encounter confident expertise. How easily we hand over our uncertainty. How quickly we second-guess our doubts. And how, without meaning to, we sometimes place more trust in the messenger than in our own lived experience.

I’ve been on both sides of that exchange. I’ve sought advice that left me doubting myself, and I’ve offered advice that others trusted too readily. This isn’t about pointing fingers. It’s about noticing the small, human patterns that show up when we’re searching for guidance—and remembering that even in the presence of expertise, our own perspective matters too.

Authority Bias – Why We Trust the Confident and Credentialed

The more someone looks the part of authority, the easier it becomes to question personal instincts instead of their advice.

There’s something disarming about confidence. When someone speaks with certainty—especially about something we don’t fully understand—it’s easy to believe them. Not because we’ve evaluated every claim carefully, but because confidence itself feels like evidence.

Psychologists call this authority bias: the tendency to place more trust in someone simply because they hold a position of perceived authority. Sometimes that authority comes from formal credentials—a lab coat, a title, an impressive list of followers. Sometimes it’s subtler: a polished tone, a well-lit video, a way of speaking that leaves no room for hesitation.

Experts and advice-givers, even unintentionally, can trigger this bias every time they step into a role where they are expected to know more. And the more confident they appear, the harder it becomes to separate what they know from how they present it. Authority becomes a shortcut. Instead of weighing every piece of advice on its own merits, we start to trust the person giving it simply because they seem trustworthy.

The Milgram obedience experiments in the 1960s are often cited to show how powerful authority bias can be. In those studies, participants were instructed by a figure in a lab coat to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to another person. Many participants obeyed, even when they felt deeply uncomfortable, simply because the person telling them to continue looked and sounded like someone who should be trusted. It’s a dramatic example, but the mechanism is the same in everyday life—just quieter. We aren’t, necessarily, asked to cause harm. We’re asked to trust. To nod along. To follow the lead of someone who seems to know better than we do.

I can see this instinct in myself, especially when I’m navigating something new. It’s not just that I want information—it's that I want certainty. And when someone presents information with enough authority, it feels safer to borrow their certainty rather than sitting with my own uncertainty a little longer. It feels like protection. Like permission to stop questioning. And in small ways, that can be comforting. But in larger ways, it can lead us away from our own judgment without realizing it.

Authority itself isn’t the problem. We need people who know things we don’t. The challenge is recognizing when confidence, credentials, and charisma are filling in gaps in our evaluation—and learning how to stay present with our own quiet doubts, even when someone else sounds sure.

Fear of Being Wrong – Silence Isn’t Always Consent

Silence in a conversation isn’t always agreement—it can also be the cost of not wanting to seem difficult.

There’s a particular kind of discomfort that comes with questioning someone who seems to know what they’re talking about. Even when something feels off—when the advice doesn’t fully fit, or when part of us hesitates—it’s not always easy to say so. It’s not just about logic. It's about emotion. Fear. Vulnerability.

Experts and advice-givers, especially when they speak with confidence, can create an invisible pressure around the conversation. Not by demanding agreement outright—but by being positioned, both intentionally and unintentionally, as someone who holds the answers. And when an expert has visible markers of success—credentials, titles, a large following—the pressure grows even stronger. It’s not just the individual’s authority we react to. It’s the weight of the social consensus around them. The more an expert is treated as someone to trust, the harder it feels to be the one person who questions, who hesitates, who asks, "Are we sure?"

The fear isn’t always about being wrong in a technical sense. Sometimes it’s about not wanting to seem difficult. Not wanting to embarrass ourselves by asking a question that sounds "obvious." Not wanting to create tension by doubting someone who appears to have answers.

This quiet social pressure isn’t just a theory. It’s been captured powerfully in experiments – most famously in the Asch conformity studies of the 1950s. In those studies, individuals were placed in a group where others—planted actors—intentionally gave clearly wrong answers to simple visual questions. Time after time, participants conformed to the wrong answers, even when they knew internally that something was wrong. They weren’t convinced by the bad answers. They were trying to avoid standing out. And one of the clearest patterns Asch found was that the pressure to conform grew stronger as more people aligned around the wrong answer. When only one or two others gave the wrong response, participants were more likely to resist. But as the group grew larger and more unanimous, the urge to silence personal doubts became overwhelming.

The parallels aren’t exact—Asch’s participants weren’t reacting to expertise, just peer consensus. But the emotional mechanism is strikingly similar. When an expert is surrounded by social validation—by followers, by applause, by the quiet agreement of others—their authority doesn't just come from their knowledge. It comes from the group itself. And challenging the group can feel even harder than challenging the expert alone.

We often think of trust—or silence—as something we choose individually. But the reality is that groups shape our reactions more than we like to admit. When we are in a group, listening to an expert or advice-giver, the quiet pressure of collective agreement can make it even harder to raise a hand, to ask a question, to say, "I’m not sure about this."

And that instinct runs deeper than any single experiment.

From an evolutionary standpoint, human beings survived not by standing alone, but by working together. In the dangerous and unpredictable world of early humanity, being part of a group meant protection. It meant access to food, shelter, and shared defense. Those who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—align with the group often found themselves isolated. And isolation, more often than not, meant death.

Our brains evolved not just to find the truth, but to find belonging. Conformity isn’t a flaw. It’s a survival strategy, passed down across thousands of generations.

Understanding that makes it easier to be compassionate with ourselves when we feel the pull to stay silent. We aren’t cowards for hesitating to speak up. We’re human.

It’s a strange thing, realizing that agreement isn’t always agreement. That silence doesn’t always mean consent. And that sometimes, the most generous thing we can do—for ourselves and even for the person giving advice—is to stay connected to that small, uncomfortable voice inside that says, "This might not be right for me."

The Halo Effect – When Talent in One Area Spills Over

Confidence and capability in one domain can cast a long shadow—making credibility seem broader than it actually is.

It’s easy to admire someone who seems impressive. Someone who speaks eloquently, succeeds visibly, or carries themselves with quiet authority. And once we’re impressed by one part of them, it’s surprisingly hard not to let that impression spill over into other areas—even areas where they may have little real expertise.

This is the Halo Effect at work: the tendency to let a positive impression in one domain—like intelligence, charisma, or skill—shape our overall perception of a person’s credibility. And more specifically, it’s something called a Competence Halo: when someone demonstrates expertise or success in one area, we unconsciously extend that trust into areas they haven't actually mastered.

When an expert excels in one field, it becomes harder to question their authority in unrelated fields. Their confidence and competence create a kind of glow that makes their words feel more trustworthy across the board—even when the topic drifts far from what they truly know.

The term "Halo Effect" was first coined by psychologist Edward Thorndike in the 1920s. In one of his studies, Thorndike asked military commanders to rate their soldiers on a variety of traits, such as intelligence, leadership, physical appearance, and loyalty. What he found was that a soldier’s rating in one area—like neatness or attractiveness—strongly influenced ratings in completely unrelated areas, like intelligence or leadership. Positive impressions clustered together, creating an illusion of well-rounded excellence that wasn’t always real.

Researchers have seen that this bias doesn’t just link physical traits to competence. It also links competence in one domain to assumed competence in others—creating the Competence Halo.

Advice-givers and experts often benefit from this without realizing it. A brilliant researcher might be asked for leadership advice, simply because they excel in research. A charismatic tech influencer might be treated as a financial expert, just because they project success. The strength of the first impression colors everything that follows.

I’ve seen this from the side of a haloed expert. In my work as an instructional designer, technologist, and educator, I’ve occasionally found myself treated as an authority far beyond my areas of expertise. I remember once being in a discussion where the topic of quantum computing came up. It’s not my field. I’ve read a few articles out of curiosity, but I have no real grounding in the subject. Still, when I offered a few cautious thoughts—mostly conjecture based on what little I knew—the people I was talking to seemed to accept my words without hesitation. Not because my insights were particularly strong, but because I carried credibility in related areas. And in that moment, it was clear how easy it is for credibility to bleed from one domain into another—without anyone meaning for it to happen.

The Halo Effect isn’t about being foolish, or manipulative. It’s about being human. Admiration is natural. Trust is natural. But even when someone shines brightly in one area, it’s worth remembering that no one shines everywhere.

Overvaluing Specialized Knowledge – The Pull of Information Scarcity

There’s a particular kind of relief that comes from knowing someone else has it covered. When a specialist steps in—a doctor, a financial advisor, a tech expert—the burden of figuring things out shifts off our shoulders. We can breathe a little easier. We don’t have to master the details ourselves. Someone who knows the landscape is guiding us through it.

That relief isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s a deeply human response. We were never built to know everything ourselves. From the earliest days of human survival, communities have depended on division of labor—some people knew how to hunt, others how to heal, others how to build shelter. Trusting those with specialized skills was necessary. It freed up time, energy, and attention for other needs. And even now, in a world of breathtaking complexity, that basic instinct hasn’t changed.

Philosopher Alvin Goldman called this epistemic dependence: the idea that we must rely on others for knowledge that we can't easily verify or produce ourselves. It’s not just convenient—it’s essential. Without this trust, society would collapse under the weight of every individual needing to independently verify every piece of information they encounter.

But that same dependence can sometimes lull us into a kind of over-trust. Because it feels good—reassuring—to hand over the uncertainty. And the more specialized the knowledge, the less equipped we feel to question it, even when something inside us hesitates.

I’ve been on the other side of this dynamic, too. In my work as an instructional designer and technologist, I’ve sometimes found myself in situations where people deferred to me simply because I understood a system, a platform, or a workflow that felt opaque to them. There was a time when I was advising a team on implementing a new learning management system. I was confident in the path we were taking—it aligned with what I knew, what I had seen work before.

The team trusted me fully. And there was a deep sense of responsibility that came with that trust—a pressure to live up to it, to make the complexity feel invisible to them. But later, as complications emerged that I hadn’t anticipated, I realized how easily I had accepted their confidence without leaving enough room for uncertainty. Their trust had felt good. It had made me want to project even more certainty than I actually felt. And in doing so, I had underestimated the complexity we were facing.

It’s humbling to recognize how easy it is, even with good intentions, to accept the relief people feel when they hand over uncertainty—without always honoring how fragile that trust can be.

Specialized knowledge is powerful. And the people who carry it often deserve our admiration and respect. But dependence—especially dependence that feels like relief—comes with a hidden cost. It’s not wrong to trust experts. It’s just important to stay awake, even when trusting feels easier than questioning.

Trust Yourself, Too

It’s not wrong to seek expertise. It’s wise.

None of us can know everything. And in a world as intricate as ours, leaning on the knowledge of others is part of how we survive, how we build, how we move forward together. Experts, mentors, advice-givers—they offer tools and perspectives that can open doors we might never find on our own. Their work matters. Their insight matters.

But so does ours.

The deeper truth is that no one—not even the most credentialed, confident, or well-meaning expert—can ever fully know the landscape of our lives. They can offer maps. But we’re the ones who have to walk the terrain.

I see this more clearly now than I used to. How easy it is to hand over decisions, big and small, simply because someone else seems to know better. And how often that impulse comes not from laziness or weakness, but from hope. Hope that someone else might carry the uncertainty for us. Hope that if we trust enough, the path will be easier.

But expertise doesn’t erase our responsibility to ourselves. And trusting an expert doesn't mean silencing the quiet voice inside that says, "Does this really fit me?" or "Is there something important here I'm being asked to overlook?"

The goal isn’t to distrust expertise. It’s to carry our own experience, instincts, and questions into the conversation, too.

Because while knowledge can come from others, wisdom—the kind that fits our lives, our needs, our realities—can only be built from within.