It’s ok to read someone else’s research. But if you automatically dismiss anything that disagrees with a previously held belief, you aren’t researching, you’re looking for confirmation. You can find confirmation for just about anything.

It’s one thing to be critical and say “maybe the specific scenario presented here doesn’t really apply to me.” It’s quite another to say “this can’t be true because I read something before that said the opposite.”

Most people “doing their own research” fall in to the latter category.