Four Attitudes & Behaviors of a Good Scientist

by Fred Decker; Updated February 26, 2018

The scientific attitude is one that harnesses and directs the power of the human brain, turning it to the investigation of the observable world. Scientists learn to think in specific ways, deducing patterns and principles from observations of the way things work. Over time, the collective effort of scientists in a given field produces a body of reliable knowledge that can be used as a stepping stone to new discoveries. This progress begins with a few simple attitudes and behaviors.

Curiosity and Wonder

Curiosity is a fundamental characteristic of a scientist. An urge to know and understand the natural world is part of the makeup of every healthy baby, and it's how humans learn to adapt to the world. Over time, most people come to understand that things act in a specific way, and are satisfied with that. Scientists are not. Their curiosity leads them to study how things in the natural world behave, why, and what factors might affect them. This requires a certain degree of creativity.

Creativity and Imagination

Scientists must have fertile mind because creating a plausible reason for things to work as they do is a crucial step in scientific investigation. Creating a hypothesis that can explain a phenomenon, and then constructing an experiment to test that hypothesis and establish its accuracy, lies at the heart of the scientific method. This creativity, or mental agility, must also extend to recognizing unanticipated factors when they intrude on the experiment. Alexander Fleming provides a famous example of this attribute. When his bacterial cultures were contaminated by mold spores, he noticed that the mold killed bacteria in his samples. This observation led to the discovery of penicillin.

Accuracy of Observation

Fleming's discovery also points to skill in observation, another important characteristic of good scientists. Much scientific progress has been fueled by observing and recording natural phenomena, even when those observations seem unimportant to the subject at hand. Often their importance becomes clear only after new discoveries, technological advances or statistical analysis. For example, neurological researchers regularly use magnetic resonance imaging to monitor the activity of subjects' brains as they carry out specific tasks.

Skeptical Approach

The results of a scientific experiment are only as good as the hypothesis and experiment that gave rise to them. That's why skepticism is also an essential part of a good scientist's mental makeup. When reviewing the results of an experiment, a scientist must always consider it critically. There might be a flaw in the experimental process, or the way the observations were conducted. The results might conflict with those of similar experiments performed by other scientists, or there might be a hypothesis that better explains the experiment's results. This is why good scientists publish their work in peer-reviewed journals, to benefit from the collective skepticism of their peers.

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