In the age of the influencer, we have confused visibility with validity — and lost the ability to tell the difference.
There has been a great deal of discourse lately surrounding a woman whose credentials and academic background have come into public question. Depending on who you ask, she is either a fraud who misrepresented herself, or a powerful and effective voice whose impact matters far more than a degree ever could. What has interested me most is not the woman herself. It is the conversation her situation has exposed.
As a psychologist with more than 25 years in the field, I watched the public discourse split almost immediately into two polarized camps. One side said: credentials are everything. The other responded: credentials don’t matter at all if someone is effective. Personally, I think the truth lives somewhere in the middle. And increasingly, I believe our inability to tolerate that middle is becoming one of the most consequential intellectual and psychological problems of our time.
We live in a culture where visibility is routinely mistaken for validity. If someone is charismatic, emotionally resonant, relatable, confident, or impactful, people often assume that expertise naturally follows. Social media has blurred the lines between expert, influencer, entertainer, educator, therapist, mentor, and life coach — until those distinctions barely register for most people consuming content.
I want to be careful here. I’m not saying that only credentialed professionals produce value. Not everyone needs therapy. Sometimes people genuinely need a trusted friend, a mentor, a coach, a wise elder, or simply someone who makes them feel less alone. There is absolutely a place for that. The human need for connection and resonance is real, and it doesn’t always require clinical intervention to be met.
But there is a meaningful difference between influence and expertise.
And I believe we’re losing the ability to distinguish between the two.
Years ago, I attended a workshop called the Landmark Forum. One concept from that experience has stayed with me: there’s what you know. There’s what you know you don’t know. And there’s what you don’t know that you don’t know. Experts understand the difference between those categories. Ironically, many people with deep expertise speak with more humility, not less, because genuine knowledge reveals complexity. The more you truly learn, the more aware you become of the limits of your own understanding.
This is part of why the Dunning-Kruger effect has always fascinated me. Confidence, in the absence of competence, is not a credential. It is a warning sign.
I have over 25 years of experience in psychology. I rarely walk around calling myself an expert. Other people often do that for me. But I know enough about psychology, trauma, human behavior, ethics, diagnosis, and research to know there is still so much I do not know. That awareness is not false modesty. That awareness is the mark of expertise.
People often invoke the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to master something. But I think we’ve culturally misapplied that concept in a meaningful way. Experience alone does not automatically create expertise. If I sit on an airplane for 10,000 hours, I don’t become a pilot. If I spend 10,000 hours watching surgery, I don’t become a surgeon. If I spend 10,000 hours in conversations with hurting people, I don’t automatically become a psychologist.
The original concept behind mastery was never simply about repetition. It involved deliberate practice within a structured framework of education, mentorship, correction, ethical accountability, supervised experience, and demonstrated competence. Expertise is not confidence plus experience. It is experience interpreted through a validated body of knowledge and refined under accountability.
Now let me also say something clearly: psychology and academia are not innocent institutions. Psychology has historically caused significant harm — especially to Black communities. From racist intelligence testing to the pathologizing of culturally normative behavior, there are legitimate reasons many people distrust mental health systems and credentialed institutions. I understand that distrust. I share some of it.
Sometimes credentialed people are harmful. Sometimes deeply educated people lack wisdom, warmth, humanity, or integrity. And sometimes people hear professionals defending credentials and hear gatekeeping, elitism, or an institutional instinct to protect itself. I understand that reading too.
And yet — transparency still matters. Particularly for communities that have historically been manipulated, experimented on, misdiagnosed, and harmed without informed consent. People deserve to know who they are listening to, what training that person has, what framework they operate from, and what qualifies them to make the claims they are making. That is not elitism. That is informed consent.
As I write this, I’m on my way to testify as an expert witness in a court of law. One of the first things the attorneys will do is establish my standing. They’ll review my education, my licensure, my training, my experience, my areas of competence, and the basis for my professional opinions. They’ll do this because words matter when human lives are involved. The work we do in psychology can help save lives. It can also harm them. That is why I personally try not to say, teach, or publicly represent anything I could not ethically defend under scrutiny.
That is a high standard. I hold it consciously. Professionals are not merely offering opinions. They are operating under accountability. And accountability is precisely what gets lost when influence replaces expertise as the measure of authority.
This is where the public conversation becomes intellectually inconsistent. If degrees and credentials don’t matter, then they shouldn’t be invoked. But if someone uses titles, academic affiliations, or claims of expertise to establish authority — then the public has not only the right but the responsibility to verify those claims. Trust functions holistically. That is simply how human psychology works. And when the foundation of trust is compromised, it destabilizes everything built on top of it.
Perhaps the larger question the current cultural moment is forcing us to sit with is this: in the age of influencers, who verifies authority? And perhaps an even more uncomfortable question beneath that one: have we confused emotional resonance with expertise?
Someone can absolutely be insightful, impactful, relatable, and genuinely helpful without clinical training. I’m not disputing that. But impact alone cannot be our only metric. Charisma is impactful. Manipulation is impactful. Cult leaders are impactful. Impact and expertise are not the same thing. Neither are credentials and integrity. Both matter.
I’m not interested in canceling anyone. Nor am I interested in blindly defending institutions that haven’t always served the people in their care. I’m interested in discernment. I’m interested in helping people think more carefully about how they assign trust, authority, and credibility in a world where influence is monetized and visibility can be mistaken for competence.
Some questions worth carrying with you:
Maybe maturity is not blindly trusting institutions.
Maybe it is not blindly trusting influencers, either.
Maybe the most psychologically grounded thing we can do right now is learn to ask better questions before handing someone authority over our minds, our emotions, our healing, or our most vulnerable interior places.
Because in a world full of noise, discernment may be one of the last remaining forms of wisdom.
