I’ve never been able to get excited about spectator sports. I try to pay attention to baseball games. I stare at the TV screen intending to block out everything else, but my mind always manages to wander away from the action. I rarely make it more than a few minutes before getting up and walking into another room to find more interesting diversions. I guess I’m just not a sports fan, I tell myself.
These days, when there’s a game on, I don’t even glance at the TV. I’m not a sports fan, right? Why waste my time?
All the time we characterize ourselves. We rely on past experiences to help us understand our present selves. For years, my brother refused to eat any Thanksgiving food because he tried the Turkey at age five and didn’t like it. Here’s another example: I got in A in math in sixth grade. After that, I saw myself as the kind of person who gets A’s in math. Even if it meant spending twice as many hours on homework as my friends spent, and staying home while they went to the park or the mall, I made sure that I kept getting A’s in math. I preferred to do the extra work and keep the certainty about that part of my identity.
Self-characterizations are enticing. We take personality tests, eager to learn something enlightening about ourselves. It’s also convenient to have our identities pinned down. Knowing our personalities and preferences helps us make decisions more easily.
But what if we’re wrong? What if there’s a sport out there that I’d enjoy watching? Or what if I used to dislike sports but I’ve changed? What if I’m missing out on a wealth of enjoyment opportunities? The doubt sets in…
When the World Cup started, I went out to the Slow Train Café with Anna Brown to watch the U.S vs. England game, hoping either to confirm my self-assessment or to replace it with a new one. I wanted either to love every minute or to zone out after the first three.
There was already a crowd of fans circled around the TV when we got there. All the chairs we gone, so Anna and I pulled stools away from the bar and sat at the back edge of the hoard. Soon, we were watching the ball dart all over the field.
During the 90 minute game, I did space out a few times, but I stayed until the end! I liked following the ball as it moved from player to player and trying to analyze team strategies. I felt a thrill when the other fans gasped at a save or stood up and cheered a goal. By the second half, I was gasping and cheering with everyone else. When it was over, I thought, hey, that wasn’t bad.
Then, while biking home, I started to wonder: What does this mean? Am I a soccer fan, now? Or am I just a fan of world championships? Or is it just the social aspect of the game that I enjoy? I’d raised a whole new set of questions by testing one previous conclusion about myself. But on the upside, I got to enjoy the rest of the World Cup. And I might go out to see a baseball game later in the summer.
But what about the desire humans have to understand ourselves? Well, I guess identity is murky. We rarely get the luxury of attributes that fit into neat little boxes. And maybe we’re fooling ourselves by trying to force them in and make them fit. Instead, we learn more about ourselves when we cultivate doubt. Only because I doubted my self-characterization did I end up closer to the truth about myself. Certainty feels good, sure, but if I really want to understand myself, I have to accept that I’m complex.
Doubt guides scientific inquiry just as much as our search for identity. Science is the search for truth, but the way we find truth is by doubting. The famous physicist Richard Feynman expressed this in a lecture on the Value of Science in 1955: “We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.”
While I spend most of my hours this summer in the lab with two lab-mates and my adviser, trying to learn about how hydrogen sticks to different porous materials, we keep doubting our conclusions. Trying to add more certainty to our conclusions, we do experiments, which almost always give us a dozen new questions for every answer. Sure, it would be easier to publish a paper with our preliminary findings and presume that we’re interpreting our data correctly, but that’s not how science works. We need doubt and uncertainty to get closer to truth. Even if it’s uncomfortable, doubt has led me somewhere better than where I was before. As I finish writing this, the Spain vs. Netherlands World Cup final is about to start. I can’t wait!
