Question: When you don’t know something what do you do?

Emily Mattacola answered on 14 Nov 2019:

This is something that happens to us all of the time! No one knows everything, and my students never cease to amaze me with their weird and wonderful questions. I’m always honest with them, and if they ask me something I’ve got no idea about, I’ll just say so. Often the students will go away in their own time and look up the answer, and tell me the next time I see them, which is a really great thing as it helps us all to learn and to share knowledge.

If there’s something I need to know for my own work or interest, I’ll try to find some studies which have looked into the area and see what’s been done. The thing to remember though is that psychology is a baby in terms of how much we know about this area. People have been studying physics for thousands of years. Psychology, however, is only around 100 years old. That means that a lot of the time we’re looking for an answer that we just don’t know yet! When this happens, I add it to my every growing study ideas notebook, and hope that I might have the time to be able to try to answer that question myself at some point.