The nightmare of saying ‘I don’t know’ out loud.

If you ever wondered what the academic equivalent of “the common child’s nightmare of going to school while in your pyjamas” is, chances are most researchers under 40 years old will respond the same:

Not knowing the answer to an important question.

This is a particular moment many of us recognise instantly, because when a question that you cannot answer arises during an important meeting, your mind automatically switches to panic mode. It goes blank and, even before saying ‘I don’t know’, a horror film starts projecting in your head. 

The face of your supervisor seeming to say ‘I chose the wrong person for the role’, even if their mouth hasn’t even opened.

The impossible-to-stop debacle in your career.

The immediate and inevitable failure of your project because, out of the 37 papers you read for this meeting, you left out the one from 2003 that suddenly feels like the paramount milestone.

However, the funny thing is that most of the time, that look is not even there on the face of your supervisor, your career is not ending, and that paper is simply outdated. This agonising feeling is usually a projection - a reflection of what we think of ourselves in that moment, rather than what is actually taking place. 

In other words, it’s impostor syndrome speaking louder than reality.

It’s not rare for early-stage researchers to assume that competence means constant knowing, and that uncertainty is direct and undeniable evidence of failure. 

When we are just starting our academic career, we often picture a good, successful academic as someone with perfect answers ready on demand. When we fall short of that ideal (something that we inevitably do at some point), that becomes a black-and-white issue without any grey areas. We automatically see ourselves as a complete failure, and not for a moment do we think that this might be a normal feature of research.

Okay, I might have gone a little overdramatic there, but I think the message comes across.

And then, at the other end of the spectrum, there are the most senior researchers. Widely-known, respected professionals who are not afraid to display a slide that says, in size 173, ‘We don’t really know that’ in front of a 500-person audience. 

So why do we have that irrational fear of confessing that we might not know the answer to a scientific question? And most importantly, when does it disappear to make way for that confidence?

The performance philosophy

When assessing the origin of this fear, opinions are many and varied, but the common mantra among them all is that it is not innate. Instead, the fear of not knowing is something we slowly learn throughout our preparation, and that seems to be a common trait regardless of the educational system under which you have been trained.

In STEM, the assessment systems that you are exposed to during undergraduate and master’s training quietly reward speed, fluency, and correctness (which is only logical, taking into consideration the technical details of these careers). We are trained to work under pressure, and participation grades favour those who speak confidently, thus leading us to interpret silence as a lack of preparation rather than as the result of a thoughtful process.

Even when we are preparing for an interview, we are often told to memorise a few sentences to fill the dreaded silence while we are thinking through an elaborate answer to the just-asked question.

The way I see things, this philosophy slowly builds a truth in the corner of our minds: knowledge, if not performed, doesn’t exist. 

So we go through our college years giving more value to show-offs, looking for what seems to feed our reputation and our egos, and running away from the I-don’t-knows.

By the time we reach PhD or postdoctoral stages, this performance mindset has settled, and it grows rapidly with the shift from students to roles with higher responsibility. We enter the academic circle of life that strongly characterises the system.

The system per se

Layered onto this is the power imbalance inherent in academia. Our supervisors are those who decide the distribution of a given project’s funding. They are the names signing the recommendation and reference letters that will get us (or not) into a given programme or fellowship. 

When you add this to the mix, it’s quite understandable that saying ‘I don’t know’ to the person holding a huge amount of power over your career can feel like a high-risk act, even when no real penalty exists in the immediate aftermath.

Another factor to consider is the inherent uncertainty of science. Impostor syndrome tends to surface and grow in environments where ambiguity is high (and research is nothing if not ambiguous). Experiments can still fail even if you did everything right, and there is a never-ending list of factors falling out of our control that can mess with the results. 

That combination makes progress hard to measure in the short term, therefore making it even harder to acknowledge that we are simply learning, a process that is all but linear.

That's why the contrast between early-career researchers and senior academics is so jarring. With time, the evolutionary process of Homo academicus leads the individual to develop the ability to openly, calmly, sometimes even cheerfully say ‘I don’t know’. And the reason is extremely simple: because it is rarely a passive sentence. Senior academics usually proceed to list the collection of experiments and hypotheses they are going to test in order to find out the answer, so their lack of certainty is never seen as a weakness. 

While I believe changing that trend would be beneficial for all of us, it is so inherently rooted in academia that this is definitely not an easy task to address. However, from my take, that process starts with naming that confusion and normalising it.

After all, research does not move forward because we know the answers. It advances when researchers stop circling around the concept of not knowing and state plainly that they have genuinely no idea, but that they are determined to find out.