I think the issue is that "do more research" sounds good as an idea but ignores the fact that most people have pretty much 0 technical literacy and frankly lack the understanding of things like statistics, methodology, or just generally how science works to actually even properly do their own research. I'm a PhD in biomedical engineering, and I fucking hate reading through journal articles because they're incredibly dense, often full of jargon, and it requires a substantial amount of thought and carefully looking through them to give them a good assessment, and I'm talking about stuff that falls under my area of expertise. It's even worse for stuff that's in my field but outside my specific area of expertise. A layperson is frankly not going to be able to make accurate and meaningful conclusions when reading a study or be able to dissect whether the methodology is good and whether the results support the conclusion that's being made, especially when our education system does pretty much nothing to teach scientific and technical literacy in mandatory education (statistics really should be a mandatory high school course for everyone). Of course, this could be circumvented by talking to experts who summarize the info, but at that point stop claiming you're doing your own research, you're getting secondhand info from people who will inevitably insert their own bias into things. That's why science relies on consensus of experts. And of course, most of these people aren't getting their info from any sort of expert at all, they're getting it from the media, news, and other people who are conveying the info through a long game of telephone where biases and misunderstandings get injected at literally every step. And for somebody with no background in the field, figuring out who is a reliable source can be tricky in the first place. So what ends up happening when people "do their own research" is they just gravitate to whatever they can find the validates whatever they were already thinking