Rather than completely dismissing conventional wisdom, Uwe Flick (1992) said that social psychology taps everyday knowledge as a primary source for research, saying that “everyday knowledge and its social transformation” are essential responsibilities of the social psychologist. Scientific knowledge is gradually proving or disproving conventional wisdom as the results of scientific inquiry filter into public opinion to strengthen or replace everyday knowledge.

Social psychologists further defend their field against accusations that it documents the obvious by saying that the problem is with individual bias and overestimation of intellectual power, not with the discoveries of social psychology. In other words, some social psychologists believe that the criticism says more about the critic than it does about the field. “Any psychological experiment can seem like common sense—after you know the result” (Myers, 2008, p. 14). This “hindsight bias”, refers to a tendency to overestimate personal ability to predict events after the individual already knows the outcome (Aronson, 2008).

Evoking the “hindsight is 20/20” cliché and encouraging “chicken or egg” debates, Myers (2008) said, “One problem with common sense is that we invoke it after we know the facts. Events are far more… predictable in hindsight” (p. 14). Taking the “chicken or egg” approach, Aronson acknowledged that conventional wisdom generally does come before scientific knowledge, proposing that scientists need to explore the obvious so they can provide empirical evidence to replace conventional wisdom with scientific knowledge. He also pointed out that scientists often learn that many obvious assumptions resist scientific validation.

In a similar vein, field pioneer Fritz Heider (1958) proposed that social psychologists should embrace conventional wisdom because "it is an essential part of the phenomena in which we are interested". Heider argued that Conventional wisdom had already achieved what science attempts to achieve, "an adequate description of the subject matter which makes prediction possible." In addition, despite the "mistrust" psychologists hold for traditional perspectives, conventional wisdom can provide them with value "because of the truths it contains... psychology has a good deal to learn from common-sense psychology" (p. 5).