Why We Trust Influencers Over Experts & What It Costs

Have you ever noticed that you’ll take advice from someone you follow online without even stopping to ask: wait, are they actually qualified to tell me this? You’ve been watching them for years. You like them. You trust them. They feel like a friend. And honestly, that might be the whole problem.

Michelle recently did a TEDx talk — and it was very much in the Duped universe. The whole thing was about why we trust influencers over experts, and what we — the actual experts — can do about it.

And as she was preparing it, she kept running into this tension that I think our listeners feel constantly: real expertise is everywhere. Real experts are everywhere. And yet somehow, the people we trust most online are often the ones with the least depth and the most confidence.

That felt like an episode.

Today, we’re going to dig into the psychology of why this happens, what it costs us, and how to protect yourself from it.

The Trust Vacuum

Let’s start with what trust actually is — because I think we use the word loosely.

Charles Feltman, in The Thin Book of Trust, defines it this way: “Trust is choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions.”

Trust isn’t about liking someone. It’s a risk. It’s saying: I’m going to let your knowledge affect something that matters to me.

And when experts feel distant, condescending, or hard to understand, people pull back. They look for someone who feels safer, even if safer and smarter aren’t the same thing.

According to Pew Research, only 45% of Americans think scientists are good communicators. And nearly half believe scientists see themselves as superior to others. That’s not a trust problem — that’s a communication problem that became a trust problem.

The algorithm rewards relatability. The more you engage with someone’s content and see them, the more familiar they feel. Familiarity creates liking. And as Cialdini showed us, liking creates trust — or something that feels close enough to trust that people act on it. We’ve talked about this on the show — the parasocial relationship where you feel close to someone who doesn’t know you exist.

Expertise gets decoupled from credibility. You can have thirty years of experience and a research portfolio that would make an academic weep — and still lose out to someone with a ring light and a better origin story.

When This Goes Wrong (And It Goes Very Wrong)

Does it actually matter? Who gets hurt?

If you’ve been listening to Duped long enough or are a part of the Patreon, you know the answers, and it’s been very well documented in the news as well (We don’t name names unless there is journalism to back us.)

Belle Gibson – Lied about Cancer
Tai Lopez – Ponzi Scheme

This dynamic doesn’t exist at every level of online business. If you listened to our Patreon episode where I took one for the team and read Brendon Burchard’s Millionaire Messenger, he built the whole infrastructure for it. When your definition of expertise is so broad that anyone with a story qualifies, the market ends up here.

The Expertise Paradox — Why Experts Can’t Explain Themselves

Here’s the research that reframed this for me.

Dreyfus and Dreyfus — two MIT researchers — mapped how expertise actually develops. Five stages: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, expert.

Here’s what happens at the expert level: the process goes underground.

A novice follows rules consciously and can articulate every step. But a true expert operates from “mature and practiced understanding.” The knowledge becomes tacit — they stop consciously following rules, drawing on an immense library of internalized experience they can no longer easily access or explain.

Dreyfus and Dreyfus call this “arational” — not irrational, but beyond rational. As they write: “experts don’t solve problems and don’t make decisions; they do what normally works.”

And that creates a paradox: The more expert you become, the harder it is to explain what you do and why it works.

This is why real experts have such a hard time marketing themselves (which is why Michelle’s business exists). Meanwhile, someone with half the experience can rattle off exactly what they do — because they’re still conscious of every step. They’re better at marketing because they’re not as good at what they do.

Michael Lewis in Against the Rules put it perfectly: “The kind of people who sit there thinking about how to market themselves aren’t the kind of people developing these exquisite expertises.”

The Parasocial Layer

So we have experts who can’t explain themselves and influencers who can. But there’s a third element making this even stickier: parasocial relationships.

Horton and Wohl, 1956 — one-sided relationships where you extend time, energy, and emotional investment to someone who doesn’t know you exist. You know their morning routine. You’ve watched them cry. They have no idea who you are.

What we haven’t said explicitly enough: parasocial bonds don’t just make you like someone. They make you trust their expertise — even when they have none.

The mechanism: Cialdini’s liking principle tells us we’re more easily influenced by people we like. When you feel close to someone — even one-sidedly — your critical thinking gets shut off. You stop asking “Are they actually qualified?” because it feels rude to ask a friend.

And the more content you consume, the deeper the bond. That’s not accidental — it’s the strategy. The relationship feels like the vetting process. It isn’t.

This is exactly why people make $10,000 and $25,000 decisions based on someone they’ve never met, whose credentials they’ve never checked. And it trains the market to expect things real experts can’t — and shouldn’t — deliver: certainty, simplicity, a formula that works for everyone. When it doesn’t work, it’s always your fault. The victim-blame mechanism we’ve repeatedly named on this show.

Real expertise sounds like nuance and “it depends.” In a market trained on five-step frameworks, that sounds like weakness. The fake expert sounds like leadership. The real expert sounds like a disclaimer.

How to Protect Yourself

Okay. We are not a podcast that ends with “and therefore everything is terrible, good luck.” So let’s talk about what can actually be done.

Fluency ≠ expertise. The person who can explain themselves most easily may be the least qualified. Expertise goes underground at the highest levels.
Check credentials beyond the backstory. Ask why they’re qualified — not just what story led them here.
Trace the expertise chain. Research their training, mentors, and certifications. Two levels down is where the truth often lives.
Watch the marketing signals. Content about ideas vs. content about income. One of these builds trust; the other builds followers.
Don’t let liking override vetting. Parasocial connection is real. It’s also not the same as professional trust.