critical thinking is smart thinking that involves

Critical Thinking: What It Is and Why It Matters

Defining critical thinking dispositions and why they’re crucial..

Posted September 23, 2024 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

• Another way to think about and measure critical thinking is to include aspects of motivational dispositions.
• Dispositions include open-mindedness and a willingness to be reflective when evaluating information.
• People scoring low in critical thinking dispositions tend to “keep it simple” when something is complex.
• Critical thinking dispositions help individuals avoid oversimplification and can facilitate awareness of bias.

Critical thinking springs from the notion of reflective thought proposed by Dewey (1933), who borrowed from the work of philosophers such as William James and Charles Peirce. Reflective thought was defined as the process of suspending judgment, remaining open-minded, maintaining a healthy skepticism, and taking responsibility for one’s own development (Gerber et al., 2005; Stoyanov & Kirshner, 2007).

Kurland (1995) suggested, “Critical thinking is concerned with reason, intellectual honesty, and open-mindedness, as opposed to emotionalism, intellectual laziness, and closed-mindedness. Thus, critical thinking involves… considering all possibilities… being precise; considering a variety of possible viewpoints and explanations; weighing the effects of motives and biases; being concerned more with finding the truth than with being right…being aware of one’s own prejudices and biases” (p. 3). Thus, being able to perspective-take and becoming conscious of one’s own biases are potential benefits of critical thinking capacities.

Reviews of the critical thinking literature (e.g., Bensley, 2023) suggest that the assessment of this construct ought to include aspects of motivational dispositions. Numerous frameworks of critical thinking dispositions have been proposed (e.g., Bensley, 2018; Butler & Halpern, 2019; Dwyer, 2017); some commonly identified dispositions are open-mindedness, intellectual engagement, and a proclivity to take a reflective stance or approach to evaluating information and the views and beliefs of both oneself and others. Demir (2022) posited that critical thinking dispositions reflect persons’ attitudes toward and routine ways of responding to new information and diverging ideas, willingness to engage in nuanced and complex rather than either/or reductionistic thinking, and perseverance in attempts to understand and resolve complex problems.

Other examples of dispositions are inquisitiveness, open-mindedness, tolerance for ambiguity, thinking about thinking, honesty in assessing or evaluating biases, and willingness to reconsider one’s own views and ways of doing things (Facione et al., 2001). Individual personality attributes associated with these proclivities include a need for cognition (a desire for intellectual stimulation), which is positively associated with critical thinking, and the need for closure (a motivated cognitive style in which individuals prefer predictability, firm answers, and rapid decision making ) and anti-intellectualism (a resentment of “the life of the mind” and those who represent it), both negatively associated with critical thinking.

Further, an ideological component that can impede critical thinking is dogmatism . In addition, rigid, dichotomous thinking impedes critical thinking in that it oversimplifies the complexity of social life in a pluralistic society (Bensley, 2023; Cheung et al., 2002; Halpern & Dunn, 2021) and tries to reduce complicated phenomena and resolve complex problems via “either/or” formulations and simplistic solutions.

In other words, folks with low critical thinking dispositions would tend to “keep it simple” when something is really quite complicated, and think it absolute terms and categories rather than seeing “the gray” in between the black and white extremes.

In sum, critical thinking dispositions are vitally important because they may help individuals avoid oversimplifying reality; they also permit perspective-taking and can facilitate their awareness of diversity and systematic biases, such as racial or gender bias . Some research has indicated that critical thinking dispositions uniquely contribute to academic performance beyond general cognition (Ren et al., 2020), and may help to reduce unsubstantiated claims and conspiracy beliefs (Bensley, 2023; Lantian et al., 2021).

But before we can study the potential impact of critical thinking dispositions, it is necessary to have a reliable, valid, and hopefully brief measure for this construct. I will discuss the development and validation of a measure of critical thinking dispositions in another post.

Bensley, D.A. ( 2023.) Critical thinking, intelligence, and unsubstantiated beliefs: An integrative review. Journal of Intelligence, 1 , 207. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence11110207

Bensley, D.A. (2018). Critical thinking in psychology and everyday life: A guide to effective thinking . New York: Worth Publishers.

Butler, H.A., & Halpern, D.F. (2019). Is critical thinking a better model of intelligence? In Robert J. Sternberg (Ed.) The Nature of Intelligence (pp. 183–96). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cheung, C.-K, Rudowicz. E., Kwan, A., & Yue, X.. (2002). Assessing university students’ general and specific criticalthinking. College Student Journal, 36 , 504 – 25.

Demir, E. (2022). An examination of high school students’ critical thinking dispositions and analytical thinking skills. Journal of Pedagogical Research, 6 , 190–200. https://doi.org/10.33902/JPR.202217357

Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process . Lexington: Heath and Company.

Dwyer, C. P. (2017). Critical thinking: Conceptual perspectives and practical guidelines . Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Facione, P., Facione, N,C,, & Giancarlo, C.A.F. (2001(. California Critical Disposition Inventory . Millbrae: California Academic Press.

Gerber, S., Scott, L., Clements, D.H., & Sarama, J. (2005). Instructor influence on reasoned argument in discussion boards. Educational Technology, Research & Development, 53 , 25–39. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02504864

Halpern, D. F., & Dunn, D.S. (2021). Critical thinking: A model of intelligence for solving real-world problems. Journal of Intelligence, 9 , 22. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence9020022

Kurland, D. (1995). I know what it says… What does it mean? Critical skills for critical reading . Belmont: Wadsworth.

Lantian, A., Bagneux, V., Delouvee, S., & Gauvrit, N. (2021). Maybe a free thinker but not a critical one: High conspiracybelief is associated with low critical thinking ability. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 35 , 674 – 84. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3790

Ren, X., Tong, Y., Peng, P. & Wang, T. (2020). Critical thinking predicts academic performance beyond general cognitiveability: Evidence from adults and children. Intelligence, 82 , 101487. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2020.101487

Stoyanov, S., & Kirschner, P. ( 2007). Effect of problem solving support and cognitive styles on idea generation:Implications for technology-enhanced learning. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 40 , 49–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2007.10782496

Kyle D. Killian, Ph.D., LMFT is the author of Interracial Couples, Intimacy and Therapy: Crossing Racial Borders.

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Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is a widely accepted educational goal. Its definition is contested, but the competing definitions can be understood as differing conceptions of the same basic concept: careful thinking directed to a goal. Conceptions differ with respect to the scope of such thinking, the type of goal, the criteria and norms for thinking carefully, and the thinking components on which they focus. Its adoption as an educational goal has been recommended on the basis of respect for students’ autonomy and preparing students for success in life and for democratic citizenship. “Critical thinkers” have the dispositions and abilities that lead them to think critically when appropriate. The abilities can be identified directly; the dispositions indirectly, by considering what factors contribute to or impede exercise of the abilities. Standardized tests have been developed to assess the degree to which a person possesses such dispositions and abilities. Educational intervention has been shown experimentally to improve them, particularly when it includes dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring. Controversies have arisen over the generalizability of critical thinking across domains, over alleged bias in critical thinking theories and instruction, and over the relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking.

2.1 Dewey’s Three Main Examples

2.2 dewey’s other examples, 2.3 further examples, 2.4 non-examples, 3. the definition of critical thinking, 4. its value, 5. the process of thinking critically, 6. components of the process, 7. contributory dispositions and abilities, 8.1 initiating dispositions, 8.2 internal dispositions, 9. critical thinking abilities, 10. required knowledge, 11. educational methods, 12.1 the generalizability of critical thinking, 12.2 bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, 12.3 relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking, other internet resources, related entries.

Use of the term ‘critical thinking’ to describe an educational goal goes back to the American philosopher John Dewey (1910), who more commonly called it ‘reflective thinking’. He defined it as

active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Dewey 1910: 6; 1933: 9)

and identified a habit of such consideration with a scientific attitude of mind. His lengthy quotations of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill indicate that he was not the first person to propose development of a scientific attitude of mind as an educational goal.

In the 1930s, many of the schools that participated in the Eight-Year Study of the Progressive Education Association (Aikin 1942) adopted critical thinking as an educational goal, for whose achievement the study’s Evaluation Staff developed tests (Smith, Tyler, & Evaluation Staff 1942). Glaser (1941) showed experimentally that it was possible to improve the critical thinking of high school students. Bloom’s influential taxonomy of cognitive educational objectives (Bloom et al. 1956) incorporated critical thinking abilities. Ennis (1962) proposed 12 aspects of critical thinking as a basis for research on the teaching and evaluation of critical thinking ability.

Since 1980, an annual international conference in California on critical thinking and educational reform has attracted tens of thousands of educators from all levels of education and from many parts of the world. Also since 1980, the state university system in California has required all undergraduate students to take a critical thinking course. Since 1983, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking has sponsored sessions in conjunction with the divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association (APA). In 1987, the APA’s Committee on Pre-College Philosophy commissioned a consensus statement on critical thinking for purposes of educational assessment and instruction (Facione 1990a). Researchers have developed standardized tests of critical thinking abilities and dispositions; for details, see the Supplement on Assessment . Educational jurisdictions around the world now include critical thinking in guidelines for curriculum and assessment.

For details on this history, see the Supplement on History .

2. Examples and Non-Examples

Before considering the definition of critical thinking, it will be helpful to have in mind some examples of critical thinking, as well as some examples of kinds of thinking that would apparently not count as critical thinking.

Dewey (1910: 68–71; 1933: 91–94) takes as paradigms of reflective thinking three class papers of students in which they describe their thinking. The examples range from the everyday to the scientific.

Transit : “The other day, when I was down town on 16th Street, a clock caught my eye. I saw that the hands pointed to 12:20. This suggested that I had an engagement at 124th Street, at one o’clock. I reasoned that as it had taken me an hour to come down on a surface car, I should probably be twenty minutes late if I returned the same way. I might save twenty minutes by a subway express. But was there a station near? If not, I might lose more than twenty minutes in looking for one. Then I thought of the elevated, and I saw there was such a line within two blocks. But where was the station? If it were several blocks above or below the street I was on, I should lose time instead of gaining it. My mind went back to the subway express as quicker than the elevated; furthermore, I remembered that it went nearer than the elevated to the part of 124th Street I wished to reach, so that time would be saved at the end of the journey. I concluded in favor of the subway, and reached my destination by one o’clock.” (Dewey 1910: 68–69; 1933: 91–92)

Ferryboat : “Projecting nearly horizontally from the upper deck of the ferryboat on which I daily cross the river is a long white pole, having a gilded ball at its tip. It suggested a flagpole when I first saw it; its color, shape, and gilded ball agreed with this idea, and these reasons seemed to justify me in this belief. But soon difficulties presented themselves. The pole was nearly horizontal, an unusual position for a flagpole; in the next place, there was no pulley, ring, or cord by which to attach a flag; finally, there were elsewhere on the boat two vertical staffs from which flags were occasionally flown. It seemed probable that the pole was not there for flag-flying.

“I then tried to imagine all possible purposes of the pole, and to consider for which of these it was best suited: (a) Possibly it was an ornament. But as all the ferryboats and even the tugboats carried poles, this hypothesis was rejected. (b) Possibly it was the terminal of a wireless telegraph. But the same considerations made this improbable. Besides, the more natural place for such a terminal would be the highest part of the boat, on top of the pilot house. (c) Its purpose might be to point out the direction in which the boat is moving.

“In support of this conclusion, I discovered that the pole was lower than the pilot house, so that the steersman could easily see it. Moreover, the tip was enough higher than the base, so that, from the pilot’s position, it must appear to project far out in front of the boat. Moreover, the pilot being near the front of the boat, he would need some such guide as to its direction. Tugboats would also need poles for such a purpose. This hypothesis was so much more probable than the others that I accepted it. I formed the conclusion that the pole was set up for the purpose of showing the pilot the direction in which the boat pointed, to enable him to steer correctly.” (Dewey 1910: 69–70; 1933: 92–93)

Bubbles : “In washing tumblers in hot soapsuds and placing them mouth downward on a plate, bubbles appeared on the outside of the mouth of the tumblers and then went inside. Why? The presence of bubbles suggests air, which I note must come from inside the tumbler. I see that the soapy water on the plate prevents escape of the air save as it may be caught in bubbles. But why should air leave the tumbler? There was no substance entering to force it out. It must have expanded. It expands by increase of heat, or by decrease of pressure, or both. Could the air have become heated after the tumbler was taken from the hot suds? Clearly not the air that was already entangled in the water. If heated air was the cause, cold air must have entered in transferring the tumblers from the suds to the plate. I test to see if this supposition is true by taking several more tumblers out. Some I shake so as to make sure of entrapping cold air in them. Some I take out holding mouth downward in order to prevent cold air from entering. Bubbles appear on the outside of every one of the former and on none of the latter. I must be right in my inference. Air from the outside must have been expanded by the heat of the tumbler, which explains the appearance of the bubbles on the outside. But why do they then go inside? Cold contracts. The tumbler cooled and also the air inside it. Tension was removed, and hence bubbles appeared inside. To be sure of this, I test by placing a cup of ice on the tumbler while the bubbles are still forming outside. They soon reverse” (Dewey 1910: 70–71; 1933: 93–94).

Dewey (1910, 1933) sprinkles his book with other examples of critical thinking. We will refer to the following.

Weather : A man on a walk notices that it has suddenly become cool, thinks that it is probably going to rain, looks up and sees a dark cloud obscuring the sun, and quickens his steps (1910: 6–10; 1933: 9–13).

Disorder : A man finds his rooms on his return to them in disorder with his belongings thrown about, thinks at first of burglary as an explanation, then thinks of mischievous children as being an alternative explanation, then looks to see whether valuables are missing, and discovers that they are (1910: 82–83; 1933: 166–168).

Typhoid : A physician diagnosing a patient whose conspicuous symptoms suggest typhoid avoids drawing a conclusion until more data are gathered by questioning the patient and by making tests (1910: 85–86; 1933: 170).

Blur : A moving blur catches our eye in the distance, we ask ourselves whether it is a cloud of whirling dust or a tree moving its branches or a man signaling to us, we think of other traits that should be found on each of those possibilities, and we look and see if those traits are found (1910: 102, 108; 1933: 121, 133).

Suction pump : In thinking about the suction pump, the scientist first notes that it will draw water only to a maximum height of 33 feet at sea level and to a lesser maximum height at higher elevations, selects for attention the differing atmospheric pressure at these elevations, sets up experiments in which the air is removed from a vessel containing water (when suction no longer works) and in which the weight of air at various levels is calculated, compares the results of reasoning about the height to which a given weight of air will allow a suction pump to raise water with the observed maximum height at different elevations, and finally assimilates the suction pump to such apparently different phenomena as the siphon and the rising of a balloon (1910: 150–153; 1933: 195–198).

Diamond : A passenger in a car driving in a diamond lane reserved for vehicles with at least one passenger notices that the diamond marks on the pavement are far apart in some places and close together in others. Why? The driver suggests that the reason may be that the diamond marks are not needed where there is a solid double line separating the diamond lane from the adjoining lane, but are needed when there is a dotted single line permitting crossing into the diamond lane. Further observation confirms that the diamonds are close together when a dotted line separates the diamond lane from its neighbour, but otherwise far apart.

Rash : A woman suddenly develops a very itchy red rash on her throat and upper chest. She recently noticed a mark on the back of her right hand, but was not sure whether the mark was a rash or a scrape. She lies down in bed and thinks about what might be causing the rash and what to do about it. About two weeks before, she began taking blood pressure medication that contained a sulfa drug, and the pharmacist had warned her, in view of a previous allergic reaction to a medication containing a sulfa drug, to be on the alert for an allergic reaction; however, she had been taking the medication for two weeks with no such effect. The day before, she began using a new cream on her neck and upper chest; against the new cream as the cause was mark on the back of her hand, which had not been exposed to the cream. She began taking probiotics about a month before. She also recently started new eye drops, but she supposed that manufacturers of eye drops would be careful not to include allergy-causing components in the medication. The rash might be a heat rash, since she recently was sweating profusely from her upper body. Since she is about to go away on a short vacation, where she would not have access to her usual physician, she decides to keep taking the probiotics and using the new eye drops but to discontinue the blood pressure medication and to switch back to the old cream for her neck and upper chest. She forms a plan to consult her regular physician on her return about the blood pressure medication.

Candidate : Although Dewey included no examples of thinking directed at appraising the arguments of others, such thinking has come to be considered a kind of critical thinking. We find an example of such thinking in the performance task on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+), which its sponsoring organization describes as

a performance-based assessment that provides a measure of an institution’s contribution to the development of critical-thinking and written communication skills of its students. (Council for Aid to Education 2017)

A sample task posted on its website requires the test-taker to write a report for public distribution evaluating a fictional candidate’s policy proposals and their supporting arguments, using supplied background documents, with a recommendation on whether to endorse the candidate.

Immediate acceptance of an idea that suggests itself as a solution to a problem (e.g., a possible explanation of an event or phenomenon, an action that seems likely to produce a desired result) is “uncritical thinking, the minimum of reflection” (Dewey 1910: 13). On-going suspension of judgment in the light of doubt about a possible solution is not critical thinking (Dewey 1910: 108). Critique driven by a dogmatically held political or religious ideology is not critical thinking; thus Paulo Freire (1968 [1970]) is using the term (e.g., at 1970: 71, 81, 100, 146) in a more politically freighted sense that includes not only reflection but also revolutionary action against oppression. Derivation of a conclusion from given data using an algorithm is not critical thinking.

What is critical thinking? There are many definitions. Ennis (2016) lists 14 philosophically oriented scholarly definitions and three dictionary definitions. Following Rawls (1971), who distinguished his conception of justice from a utilitarian conception but regarded them as rival conceptions of the same concept, Ennis maintains that the 17 definitions are different conceptions of the same concept. Rawls articulated the shared concept of justice as

a characteristic set of principles for assigning basic rights and duties and for determining… the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. (Rawls 1971: 5)

Bailin et al. (1999b) claim that, if one considers what sorts of thinking an educator would take not to be critical thinking and what sorts to be critical thinking, one can conclude that educators typically understand critical thinking to have at least three features.

• It is done for the purpose of making up one’s mind about what to believe or do.
• The person engaging in the thinking is trying to fulfill standards of adequacy and accuracy appropriate to the thinking.
• The thinking fulfills the relevant standards to some threshold level.

One could sum up the core concept that involves these three features by saying that critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking. This core concept seems to apply to all the examples of critical thinking described in the previous section. As for the non-examples, their exclusion depends on construing careful thinking as excluding jumping immediately to conclusions, suspending judgment no matter how strong the evidence, reasoning from an unquestioned ideological or religious perspective, and routinely using an algorithm to answer a question.

If the core of critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking, conceptions of it can vary according to its presumed scope, its presumed goal, one’s criteria and threshold for being careful, and the thinking component on which one focuses. As to its scope, some conceptions (e.g., Dewey 1910, 1933) restrict it to constructive thinking on the basis of one’s own observations and experiments, others (e.g., Ennis 1962; Fisher & Scriven 1997; Johnson 1992) to appraisal of the products of such thinking. Ennis (1991) and Bailin et al. (1999b) take it to cover both construction and appraisal. As to its goal, some conceptions restrict it to forming a judgment (Dewey 1910, 1933; Lipman 1987; Facione 1990a). Others allow for actions as well as beliefs as the end point of a process of critical thinking (Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b). As to the criteria and threshold for being careful, definitions vary in the term used to indicate that critical thinking satisfies certain norms: “intellectually disciplined” (Scriven & Paul 1987), “reasonable” (Ennis 1991), “skillful” (Lipman 1987), “skilled” (Fisher & Scriven 1997), “careful” (Bailin & Battersby 2009). Some definitions specify these norms, referring variously to “consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (Dewey 1910, 1933); “the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning” (Glaser 1941); “conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication” (Scriven & Paul 1987); the requirement that “it is sensitive to context, relies on criteria, and is self-correcting” (Lipman 1987); “evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations” (Facione 1990a); and “plus-minus considerations of the product in terms of appropriate standards (or criteria)” (Johnson 1992). Stanovich and Stanovich (2010) propose to ground the concept of critical thinking in the concept of rationality, which they understand as combining epistemic rationality (fitting one’s beliefs to the world) and instrumental rationality (optimizing goal fulfillment); a critical thinker, in their view, is someone with “a propensity to override suboptimal responses from the autonomous mind” (2010: 227). These variant specifications of norms for critical thinking are not necessarily incompatible with one another, and in any case presuppose the core notion of thinking carefully. As to the thinking component singled out, some definitions focus on suspension of judgment during the thinking (Dewey 1910; McPeck 1981), others on inquiry while judgment is suspended (Bailin & Battersby 2009, 2021), others on the resulting judgment (Facione 1990a), and still others on responsiveness to reasons (Siegel 1988). Kuhn (2019) takes critical thinking to be more a dialogic practice of advancing and responding to arguments than an individual ability.

In educational contexts, a definition of critical thinking is a “programmatic definition” (Scheffler 1960: 19). It expresses a practical program for achieving an educational goal. For this purpose, a one-sentence formulaic definition is much less useful than articulation of a critical thinking process, with criteria and standards for the kinds of thinking that the process may involve. The real educational goal is recognition, adoption and implementation by students of those criteria and standards. That adoption and implementation in turn consists in acquiring the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker.

Conceptions of critical thinking generally do not include moral integrity as part of the concept. Dewey, for example, took critical thinking to be the ultimate intellectual goal of education, but distinguished it from the development of social cooperation among school children, which he took to be the central moral goal. Ennis (1996, 2011) added to his previous list of critical thinking dispositions a group of dispositions to care about the dignity and worth of every person, which he described as a “correlative” (1996) disposition without which critical thinking would be less valuable and perhaps harmful. An educational program that aimed at developing critical thinking but not the correlative disposition to care about the dignity and worth of every person, he asserted, “would be deficient and perhaps dangerous” (Ennis 1996: 172).

Dewey thought that education for reflective thinking would be of value to both the individual and society; recognition in educational practice of the kinship to the scientific attitude of children’s native curiosity, fertile imagination and love of experimental inquiry “would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste” (Dewey 1910: iii). Schools participating in the Eight-Year Study took development of the habit of reflective thinking and skill in solving problems as a means to leading young people to understand, appreciate and live the democratic way of life characteristic of the United States (Aikin 1942: 17–18, 81). Harvey Siegel (1988: 55–61) has offered four considerations in support of adopting critical thinking as an educational ideal. (1) Respect for persons requires that schools and teachers honour students’ demands for reasons and explanations, deal with students honestly, and recognize the need to confront students’ independent judgment; these requirements concern the manner in which teachers treat students. (2) Education has the task of preparing children to be successful adults, a task that requires development of their self-sufficiency. (3) Education should initiate children into the rational traditions in such fields as history, science and mathematics. (4) Education should prepare children to become democratic citizens, which requires reasoned procedures and critical talents and attitudes. To supplement these considerations, Siegel (1988: 62–90) responds to two objections: the ideology objection that adoption of any educational ideal requires a prior ideological commitment and the indoctrination objection that cultivation of critical thinking cannot escape being a form of indoctrination.

Despite the diversity of our 11 examples, one can recognize a common pattern. Dewey analyzed it as consisting of five phases:

• suggestions , in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution;
• an intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity into a problem to be solved, a question for which the answer must be sought;
• the use of one suggestion after another as a leading idea, or hypothesis , to initiate and guide observation and other operations in collection of factual material;
• the mental elaboration of the idea or supposition as an idea or supposition ( reasoning , in the sense on which reasoning is a part, not the whole, of inference); and
• testing the hypothesis by overt or imaginative action. (Dewey 1933: 106–107; italics in original)

The process of reflective thinking consisting of these phases would be preceded by a perplexed, troubled or confused situation and followed by a cleared-up, unified, resolved situation (Dewey 1933: 106). The term ‘phases’ replaced the term ‘steps’ (Dewey 1910: 72), thus removing the earlier suggestion of an invariant sequence. Variants of the above analysis appeared in (Dewey 1916: 177) and (Dewey 1938: 101–119).

The variant formulations indicate the difficulty of giving a single logical analysis of such a varied process. The process of critical thinking may have a spiral pattern, with the problem being redefined in the light of obstacles to solving it as originally formulated. For example, the person in Transit might have concluded that getting to the appointment at the scheduled time was impossible and have reformulated the problem as that of rescheduling the appointment for a mutually convenient time. Further, defining a problem does not always follow after or lead immediately to an idea of a suggested solution. Nor should it do so, as Dewey himself recognized in describing the physician in Typhoid as avoiding any strong preference for this or that conclusion before getting further information (Dewey 1910: 85; 1933: 170). People with a hypothesis in mind, even one to which they have a very weak commitment, have a so-called “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998): they are likely to pay attention to evidence that confirms the hypothesis and to ignore evidence that counts against it or for some competing hypothesis. Detectives, intelligence agencies, and investigators of airplane accidents are well advised to gather relevant evidence systematically and to postpone even tentative adoption of an explanatory hypothesis until the collected evidence rules out with the appropriate degree of certainty all but one explanation. Dewey’s analysis of the critical thinking process can be faulted as well for requiring acceptance or rejection of a possible solution to a defined problem, with no allowance for deciding in the light of the available evidence to suspend judgment. Further, given the great variety of kinds of problems for which reflection is appropriate, there is likely to be variation in its component events. Perhaps the best way to conceptualize the critical thinking process is as a checklist whose component events can occur in a variety of orders, selectively, and more than once. These component events might include (1) noticing a difficulty, (2) defining the problem, (3) dividing the problem into manageable sub-problems, (4) formulating a variety of possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (5) determining what evidence is relevant to deciding among possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (6) devising a plan of systematic observation or experiment that will uncover the relevant evidence, (7) carrying out the plan of systematic observation or experimentation, (8) noting the results of the systematic observation or experiment, (9) gathering relevant testimony and information from others, (10) judging the credibility of testimony and information gathered from others, (11) drawing conclusions from gathered evidence and accepted testimony, and (12) accepting a solution that the evidence adequately supports (cf. Hitchcock 2017: 485).

Checklist conceptions of the process of critical thinking are open to the objection that they are too mechanical and procedural to fit the multi-dimensional and emotionally charged issues for which critical thinking is urgently needed (Paul 1984). For such issues, a more dialectical process is advocated, in which competing relevant world views are identified, their implications explored, and some sort of creative synthesis attempted.

If one considers the critical thinking process illustrated by the 11 examples, one can identify distinct kinds of mental acts and mental states that form part of it. To distinguish, label and briefly characterize these components is a useful preliminary to identifying abilities, skills, dispositions, attitudes, habits and the like that contribute causally to thinking critically. Identifying such abilities and habits is in turn a useful preliminary to setting educational goals. Setting the goals is in its turn a useful preliminary to designing strategies for helping learners to achieve the goals and to designing ways of measuring the extent to which learners have done so. Such measures provide both feedback to learners on their achievement and a basis for experimental research on the effectiveness of various strategies for educating people to think critically. Let us begin, then, by distinguishing the kinds of mental acts and mental events that can occur in a critical thinking process.

• Observing : One notices something in one’s immediate environment (sudden cooling of temperature in Weather , bubbles forming outside a glass and then going inside in Bubbles , a moving blur in the distance in Blur , a rash in Rash ). Or one notes the results of an experiment or systematic observation (valuables missing in Disorder , no suction without air pressure in Suction pump )
• Feeling : One feels puzzled or uncertain about something (how to get to an appointment on time in Transit , why the diamonds vary in spacing in Diamond ). One wants to resolve this perplexity. One feels satisfaction once one has worked out an answer (to take the subway express in Transit , diamonds closer when needed as a warning in Diamond ).
• Wondering : One formulates a question to be addressed (why bubbles form outside a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , how suction pumps work in Suction pump , what caused the rash in Rash ).
• Imagining : One thinks of possible answers (bus or subway or elevated in Transit , flagpole or ornament or wireless communication aid or direction indicator in Ferryboat , allergic reaction or heat rash in Rash ).
• Inferring : One works out what would be the case if a possible answer were assumed (valuables missing if there has been a burglary in Disorder , earlier start to the rash if it is an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug in Rash ). Or one draws a conclusion once sufficient relevant evidence is gathered (take the subway in Transit , burglary in Disorder , discontinue blood pressure medication and new cream in Rash ).
• Knowledge : One uses stored knowledge of the subject-matter to generate possible answers or to infer what would be expected on the assumption of a particular answer (knowledge of a city’s public transit system in Transit , of the requirements for a flagpole in Ferryboat , of Boyle’s law in Bubbles , of allergic reactions in Rash ).
• Experimenting : One designs and carries out an experiment or a systematic observation to find out whether the results deduced from a possible answer will occur (looking at the location of the flagpole in relation to the pilot’s position in Ferryboat , putting an ice cube on top of a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , measuring the height to which a suction pump will draw water at different elevations in Suction pump , noticing the spacing of diamonds when movement to or from a diamond lane is allowed in Diamond ).
• Consulting : One finds a source of information, gets the information from the source, and makes a judgment on whether to accept it. None of our 11 examples include searching for sources of information. In this respect they are unrepresentative, since most people nowadays have almost instant access to information relevant to answering any question, including many of those illustrated by the examples. However, Candidate includes the activities of extracting information from sources and evaluating its credibility.
• Identifying and analyzing arguments : One notices an argument and works out its structure and content as a preliminary to evaluating its strength. This activity is central to Candidate . It is an important part of a critical thinking process in which one surveys arguments for various positions on an issue.
• Judging : One makes a judgment on the basis of accumulated evidence and reasoning, such as the judgment in Ferryboat that the purpose of the pole is to provide direction to the pilot.
• Deciding : One makes a decision on what to do or on what policy to adopt, as in the decision in Transit to take the subway.

By definition, a person who does something voluntarily is both willing and able to do that thing at that time. Both the willingness and the ability contribute causally to the person’s action, in the sense that the voluntary action would not occur if either (or both) of these were lacking. For example, suppose that one is standing with one’s arms at one’s sides and one voluntarily lifts one’s right arm to an extended horizontal position. One would not do so if one were unable to lift one’s arm, if for example one’s right side was paralyzed as the result of a stroke. Nor would one do so if one were unwilling to lift one’s arm, if for example one were participating in a street demonstration at which a white supremacist was urging the crowd to lift their right arm in a Nazi salute and one were unwilling to express support in this way for the racist Nazi ideology. The same analysis applies to a voluntary mental process of thinking critically. It requires both willingness and ability to think critically, including willingness and ability to perform each of the mental acts that compose the process and to coordinate those acts in a sequence that is directed at resolving the initiating perplexity.

Consider willingness first. We can identify causal contributors to willingness to think critically by considering factors that would cause a person who was able to think critically about an issue nevertheless not to do so (Hamby 2014). For each factor, the opposite condition thus contributes causally to willingness to think critically on a particular occasion. For example, people who habitually jump to conclusions without considering alternatives will not think critically about issues that arise, even if they have the required abilities. The contrary condition of willingness to suspend judgment is thus a causal contributor to thinking critically.

Now consider ability. In contrast to the ability to move one’s arm, which can be completely absent because a stroke has left the arm paralyzed, the ability to think critically is a developed ability, whose absence is not a complete absence of ability to think but absence of ability to think well. We can identify the ability to think well directly, in terms of the norms and standards for good thinking. In general, to be able do well the thinking activities that can be components of a critical thinking process, one needs to know the concepts and principles that characterize their good performance, to recognize in particular cases that the concepts and principles apply, and to apply them. The knowledge, recognition and application may be procedural rather than declarative. It may be domain-specific rather than widely applicable, and in either case may need subject-matter knowledge, sometimes of a deep kind.

Reflections of the sort illustrated by the previous two paragraphs have led scholars to identify the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a “critical thinker”, i.e., someone who thinks critically whenever it is appropriate to do so. We turn now to these three types of causal contributors to thinking critically. We start with dispositions, since arguably these are the most powerful contributors to being a critical thinker, can be fostered at an early stage of a child’s development, and are susceptible to general improvement (Glaser 1941: 175)

8. Critical Thinking Dispositions

Educational researchers use the term ‘dispositions’ broadly for the habits of mind and attitudes that contribute causally to being a critical thinker. Some writers (e.g., Paul & Elder 2006; Hamby 2014; Bailin & Battersby 2016a) propose to use the term ‘virtues’ for this dimension of a critical thinker. The virtues in question, although they are virtues of character, concern the person’s ways of thinking rather than the person’s ways of behaving towards others. They are not moral virtues but intellectual virtues, of the sort articulated by Zagzebski (1996) and discussed by Turri, Alfano, and Greco (2017).

On a realistic conception, thinking dispositions or intellectual virtues are real properties of thinkers. They are general tendencies, propensities, or inclinations to think in particular ways in particular circumstances, and can be genuinely explanatory (Siegel 1999). Sceptics argue that there is no evidence for a specific mental basis for the habits of mind that contribute to thinking critically, and that it is pedagogically misleading to posit such a basis (Bailin et al. 1999a). Whatever their status, critical thinking dispositions need motivation for their initial formation in a child—motivation that may be external or internal. As children develop, the force of habit will gradually become important in sustaining the disposition (Nieto & Valenzuela 2012). Mere force of habit, however, is unlikely to sustain critical thinking dispositions. Critical thinkers must value and enjoy using their knowledge and abilities to think things through for themselves. They must be committed to, and lovers of, inquiry.

A person may have a critical thinking disposition with respect to only some kinds of issues. For example, one could be open-minded about scientific issues but not about religious issues. Similarly, one could be confident in one’s ability to reason about the theological implications of the existence of evil in the world but not in one’s ability to reason about the best design for a guided ballistic missile.

Facione (1990a: 25) divides “affective dispositions” of critical thinking into approaches to life and living in general and approaches to specific issues, questions or problems. Adapting this distinction, one can usefully divide critical thinking dispositions into initiating dispositions (those that contribute causally to starting to think critically about an issue) and internal dispositions (those that contribute causally to doing a good job of thinking critically once one has started). The two categories are not mutually exclusive. For example, open-mindedness, in the sense of willingness to consider alternative points of view to one’s own, is both an initiating and an internal disposition.

Using the strategy of considering factors that would block people with the ability to think critically from doing so, we can identify as initiating dispositions for thinking critically attentiveness, a habit of inquiry, self-confidence, courage, open-mindedness, willingness to suspend judgment, trust in reason, wanting evidence for one’s beliefs, and seeking the truth. We consider briefly what each of these dispositions amounts to, in each case citing sources that acknowledge them.

• Attentiveness : One will not think critically if one fails to recognize an issue that needs to be thought through. For example, the pedestrian in Weather would not have looked up if he had not noticed that the air was suddenly cooler. To be a critical thinker, then, one needs to be habitually attentive to one’s surroundings, noticing not only what one senses but also sources of perplexity in messages received and in one’s own beliefs and attitudes (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
• Habit of inquiry : Inquiry is effortful, and one needs an internal push to engage in it. For example, the student in Bubbles could easily have stopped at idle wondering about the cause of the bubbles rather than reasoning to a hypothesis, then designing and executing an experiment to test it. Thus willingness to think critically needs mental energy and initiative. What can supply that energy? Love of inquiry, or perhaps just a habit of inquiry. Hamby (2015) has argued that willingness to inquire is the central critical thinking virtue, one that encompasses all the others. It is recognized as a critical thinking disposition by Dewey (1910: 29; 1933: 35), Glaser (1941: 5), Ennis (1987: 12; 1991: 8), Facione (1990a: 25), Bailin et al. (1999b: 294), Halpern (1998: 452), and Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo (2001).
• Self-confidence : Lack of confidence in one’s abilities can block critical thinking. For example, if the woman in Rash lacked confidence in her ability to figure things out for herself, she might just have assumed that the rash on her chest was the allergic reaction to her medication against which the pharmacist had warned her. Thus willingness to think critically requires confidence in one’s ability to inquire (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
• Courage : Fear of thinking for oneself can stop one from doing it. Thus willingness to think critically requires intellectual courage (Paul & Elder 2006: 16).
• Open-mindedness : A dogmatic attitude will impede thinking critically. For example, a person who adheres rigidly to a “pro-choice” position on the issue of the legal status of induced abortion is likely to be unwilling to consider seriously the issue of when in its development an unborn child acquires a moral right to life. Thus willingness to think critically requires open-mindedness, in the sense of a willingness to examine questions to which one already accepts an answer but which further evidence or reasoning might cause one to answer differently (Dewey 1933; Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b; Halpern 1998, Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). Paul (1981) emphasizes open-mindedness about alternative world-views, and recommends a dialectical approach to integrating such views as central to what he calls “strong sense” critical thinking. In three studies, Haran, Ritov, & Mellers (2013) found that actively open-minded thinking, including “the tendency to weigh new evidence against a favored belief, to spend sufficient time on a problem before giving up, and to consider carefully the opinions of others in forming one’s own”, led study participants to acquire information and thus to make accurate estimations.
• Willingness to suspend judgment : Premature closure on an initial solution will block critical thinking. Thus willingness to think critically requires a willingness to suspend judgment while alternatives are explored (Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Halpern 1998).
• Trust in reason : Since distrust in the processes of reasoned inquiry will dissuade one from engaging in it, trust in them is an initiating critical thinking disposition (Facione 1990a, 25; Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001; Paul & Elder 2006). In reaction to an allegedly exclusive emphasis on reason in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, Thayer-Bacon (2000) argues that intuition, imagination, and emotion have important roles to play in an adequate conception of critical thinking that she calls “constructive thinking”. From her point of view, critical thinking requires trust not only in reason but also in intuition, imagination, and emotion.
• Seeking the truth : If one does not care about the truth but is content to stick with one’s initial bias on an issue, then one will not think critically about it. Seeking the truth is thus an initiating critical thinking disposition (Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). A disposition to seek the truth is implicit in more specific critical thinking dispositions, such as trying to be well-informed, considering seriously points of view other than one’s own, looking for alternatives, suspending judgment when the evidence is insufficient, and adopting a position when the evidence supporting it is sufficient.

Some of the initiating dispositions, such as open-mindedness and willingness to suspend judgment, are also internal critical thinking dispositions, in the sense of mental habits or attitudes that contribute causally to doing a good job of critical thinking once one starts the process. But there are many other internal critical thinking dispositions. Some of them are parasitic on one’s conception of good thinking. For example, it is constitutive of good thinking about an issue to formulate the issue clearly and to maintain focus on it. For this purpose, one needs not only the corresponding ability but also the corresponding disposition. Ennis (1991: 8) describes it as the disposition “to determine and maintain focus on the conclusion or question”, Facione (1990a: 25) as “clarity in stating the question or concern”. Other internal dispositions are motivators to continue or adjust the critical thinking process, such as willingness to persist in a complex task and willingness to abandon nonproductive strategies in an attempt to self-correct (Halpern 1998: 452). For a list of identified internal critical thinking dispositions, see the Supplement on Internal Critical Thinking Dispositions .

Some theorists postulate skills, i.e., acquired abilities, as operative in critical thinking. It is not obvious, however, that a good mental act is the exercise of a generic acquired skill. Inferring an expected time of arrival, as in Transit , has some generic components but also uses non-generic subject-matter knowledge. Bailin et al. (1999a) argue against viewing critical thinking skills as generic and discrete, on the ground that skilled performance at a critical thinking task cannot be separated from knowledge of concepts and from domain-specific principles of good thinking. Talk of skills, they concede, is unproblematic if it means merely that a person with critical thinking skills is capable of intelligent performance.

Despite such scepticism, theorists of critical thinking have listed as general contributors to critical thinking what they variously call abilities (Glaser 1941; Ennis 1962, 1991), skills (Facione 1990a; Halpern 1998) or competencies (Fisher & Scriven 1997). Amalgamating these lists would produce a confusing and chaotic cornucopia of more than 50 possible educational objectives, with only partial overlap among them. It makes sense instead to try to understand the reasons for the multiplicity and diversity, and to make a selection according to one’s own reasons for singling out abilities to be developed in a critical thinking curriculum. Two reasons for diversity among lists of critical thinking abilities are the underlying conception of critical thinking and the envisaged educational level. Appraisal-only conceptions, for example, involve a different suite of abilities than constructive-only conceptions. Some lists, such as those in (Glaser 1941), are put forward as educational objectives for secondary school students, whereas others are proposed as objectives for college students (e.g., Facione 1990a).

The abilities described in the remaining paragraphs of this section emerge from reflection on the general abilities needed to do well the thinking activities identified in section 6 as components of the critical thinking process described in section 5 . The derivation of each collection of abilities is accompanied by citation of sources that list such abilities and of standardized tests that claim to test them.

Observational abilities : Careful and accurate observation sometimes requires specialist expertise and practice, as in the case of observing birds and observing accident scenes. However, there are general abilities of noticing what one’s senses are picking up from one’s environment and of being able to articulate clearly and accurately to oneself and others what one has observed. It helps in exercising them to be able to recognize and take into account factors that make one’s observation less trustworthy, such as prior framing of the situation, inadequate time, deficient senses, poor observation conditions, and the like. It helps as well to be skilled at taking steps to make one’s observation more trustworthy, such as moving closer to get a better look, measuring something three times and taking the average, and checking what one thinks one is observing with someone else who is in a good position to observe it. It also helps to be skilled at recognizing respects in which one’s report of one’s observation involves inference rather than direct observation, so that one can then consider whether the inference is justified. These abilities come into play as well when one thinks about whether and with what degree of confidence to accept an observation report, for example in the study of history or in a criminal investigation or in assessing news reports. Observational abilities show up in some lists of critical thinking abilities (Ennis 1962: 90; Facione 1990a: 16; Ennis 1991: 9). There are items testing a person’s ability to judge the credibility of observation reports in the Cornell Critical Thinking Tests, Levels X and Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). Norris and King (1983, 1985, 1990a, 1990b) is a test of ability to appraise observation reports.

Emotional abilities : The emotions that drive a critical thinking process are perplexity or puzzlement, a wish to resolve it, and satisfaction at achieving the desired resolution. Children experience these emotions at an early age, without being trained to do so. Education that takes critical thinking as a goal needs only to channel these emotions and to make sure not to stifle them. Collaborative critical thinking benefits from ability to recognize one’s own and others’ emotional commitments and reactions.

Questioning abilities : A critical thinking process needs transformation of an inchoate sense of perplexity into a clear question. Formulating a question well requires not building in questionable assumptions, not prejudging the issue, and using language that in context is unambiguous and precise enough (Ennis 1962: 97; 1991: 9).

Imaginative abilities : Thinking directed at finding the correct causal explanation of a general phenomenon or particular event requires an ability to imagine possible explanations. Thinking about what policy or plan of action to adopt requires generation of options and consideration of possible consequences of each option. Domain knowledge is required for such creative activity, but a general ability to imagine alternatives is helpful and can be nurtured so as to become easier, quicker, more extensive, and deeper (Dewey 1910: 34–39; 1933: 40–47). Facione (1990a) and Halpern (1998) include the ability to imagine alternatives as a critical thinking ability.

Inferential abilities : The ability to draw conclusions from given information, and to recognize with what degree of certainty one’s own or others’ conclusions follow, is universally recognized as a general critical thinking ability. All 11 examples in section 2 of this article include inferences, some from hypotheses or options (as in Transit , Ferryboat and Disorder ), others from something observed (as in Weather and Rash ). None of these inferences is formally valid. Rather, they are licensed by general, sometimes qualified substantive rules of inference (Toulmin 1958) that rest on domain knowledge—that a bus trip takes about the same time in each direction, that the terminal of a wireless telegraph would be located on the highest possible place, that sudden cooling is often followed by rain, that an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug generally shows up soon after one starts taking it. It is a matter of controversy to what extent the specialized ability to deduce conclusions from premisses using formal rules of inference is needed for critical thinking. Dewey (1933) locates logical forms in setting out the products of reflection rather than in the process of reflection. Ennis (1981a), on the other hand, maintains that a liberally-educated person should have the following abilities: to translate natural-language statements into statements using the standard logical operators, to use appropriately the language of necessary and sufficient conditions, to deal with argument forms and arguments containing symbols, to determine whether in virtue of an argument’s form its conclusion follows necessarily from its premisses, to reason with logically complex propositions, and to apply the rules and procedures of deductive logic. Inferential abilities are recognized as critical thinking abilities by Glaser (1941: 6), Facione (1990a: 9), Ennis (1991: 9), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 99, 111), and Halpern (1998: 452). Items testing inferential abilities constitute two of the five subtests of the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (Watson & Glaser 1980a, 1980b, 1994), two of the four sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), three of the seven sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), 11 of the 34 items on Forms A and B of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992), and a high but variable proportion of the 25 selected-response questions in the Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Experimenting abilities : Knowing how to design and execute an experiment is important not just in scientific research but also in everyday life, as in Rash . Dewey devoted a whole chapter of his How We Think (1910: 145–156; 1933: 190–202) to the superiority of experimentation over observation in advancing knowledge. Experimenting abilities come into play at one remove in appraising reports of scientific studies. Skill in designing and executing experiments includes the acknowledged abilities to appraise evidence (Glaser 1941: 6), to carry out experiments and to apply appropriate statistical inference techniques (Facione 1990a: 9), to judge inductions to an explanatory hypothesis (Ennis 1991: 9), and to recognize the need for an adequately large sample size (Halpern 1998). The Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) includes four items (out of 52) on experimental design. The Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) makes room for appraisal of study design in both its performance task and its selected-response questions.

Consulting abilities : Skill at consulting sources of information comes into play when one seeks information to help resolve a problem, as in Candidate . Ability to find and appraise information includes ability to gather and marshal pertinent information (Glaser 1941: 6), to judge whether a statement made by an alleged authority is acceptable (Ennis 1962: 84), to plan a search for desired information (Facione 1990a: 9), and to judge the credibility of a source (Ennis 1991: 9). Ability to judge the credibility of statements is tested by 24 items (out of 76) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) and by four items (out of 52) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). The College Learning Assessment’s performance task requires evaluation of whether information in documents is credible or unreliable (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Argument analysis abilities : The ability to identify and analyze arguments contributes to the process of surveying arguments on an issue in order to form one’s own reasoned judgment, as in Candidate . The ability to detect and analyze arguments is recognized as a critical thinking skill by Facione (1990a: 7–8), Ennis (1991: 9) and Halpern (1998). Five items (out of 34) on the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992) test skill at argument analysis. The College Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) incorporates argument analysis in its selected-response tests of critical reading and evaluation and of critiquing an argument.

Judging skills and deciding skills : Skill at judging and deciding is skill at recognizing what judgment or decision the available evidence and argument supports, and with what degree of confidence. It is thus a component of the inferential skills already discussed.

Lists and tests of critical thinking abilities often include two more abilities: identifying assumptions and constructing and evaluating definitions.

In addition to dispositions and abilities, critical thinking needs knowledge: of critical thinking concepts, of critical thinking principles, and of the subject-matter of the thinking.

We can derive a short list of concepts whose understanding contributes to critical thinking from the critical thinking abilities described in the preceding section. Observational abilities require an understanding of the difference between observation and inference. Questioning abilities require an understanding of the concepts of ambiguity and vagueness. Inferential abilities require an understanding of the difference between conclusive and defeasible inference (traditionally, between deduction and induction), as well as of the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. Experimenting abilities require an understanding of the concepts of hypothesis, null hypothesis, assumption and prediction, as well as of the concept of statistical significance and of its difference from importance. They also require an understanding of the difference between an experiment and an observational study, and in particular of the difference between a randomized controlled trial, a prospective correlational study and a retrospective (case-control) study. Argument analysis abilities require an understanding of the concepts of argument, premiss, assumption, conclusion and counter-consideration. Additional critical thinking concepts are proposed by Bailin et al. (1999b: 293), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 105–106), Black (2012), and Blair (2021).

According to Glaser (1941: 25), ability to think critically requires knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning. If we review the list of abilities in the preceding section, however, we can see that some of them can be acquired and exercised merely through practice, possibly guided in an educational setting, followed by feedback. Searching intelligently for a causal explanation of some phenomenon or event requires that one consider a full range of possible causal contributors, but it seems more important that one implements this principle in one’s practice than that one is able to articulate it. What is important is “operational knowledge” of the standards and principles of good thinking (Bailin et al. 1999b: 291–293). But the development of such critical thinking abilities as designing an experiment or constructing an operational definition can benefit from learning their underlying theory. Further, explicit knowledge of quirks of human thinking seems useful as a cautionary guide. Human memory is not just fallible about details, as people learn from their own experiences of misremembering, but is so malleable that a detailed, clear and vivid recollection of an event can be a total fabrication (Loftus 2017). People seek or interpret evidence in ways that are partial to their existing beliefs and expectations, often unconscious of their “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998). Not only are people subject to this and other cognitive biases (Kahneman 2011), of which they are typically unaware, but it may be counter-productive for one to make oneself aware of them and try consciously to counteract them or to counteract social biases such as racial or sexual stereotypes (Kenyon & Beaulac 2014). It is helpful to be aware of these facts and of the superior effectiveness of blocking the operation of biases—for example, by making an immediate record of one’s observations, refraining from forming a preliminary explanatory hypothesis, blind refereeing, double-blind randomized trials, and blind grading of students’ work. It is also helpful to be aware of the prevalence of “noise” (unwanted unsystematic variability of judgments), of how to detect noise (through a noise audit), and of how to reduce noise: make accuracy the goal, think statistically, break a process of arriving at a judgment into independent tasks, resist premature intuitions, in a group get independent judgments first, favour comparative judgments and scales (Kahneman, Sibony, & Sunstein 2021). It is helpful as well to be aware of the concept of “bounded rationality” in decision-making and of the related distinction between “satisficing” and optimizing (Simon 1956; Gigerenzer 2001).

Critical thinking about an issue requires substantive knowledge of the domain to which the issue belongs. Critical thinking abilities are not a magic elixir that can be applied to any issue whatever by somebody who has no knowledge of the facts relevant to exploring that issue. For example, the student in Bubbles needed to know that gases do not penetrate solid objects like a glass, that air expands when heated, that the volume of an enclosed gas varies directly with its temperature and inversely with its pressure, and that hot objects will spontaneously cool down to the ambient temperature of their surroundings unless kept hot by insulation or a source of heat. Critical thinkers thus need a rich fund of subject-matter knowledge relevant to the variety of situations they encounter. This fact is recognized in the inclusion among critical thinking dispositions of a concern to become and remain generally well informed.

Experimental educational interventions, with control groups, have shown that education can improve critical thinking skills and dispositions, as measured by standardized tests. For information about these tests, see the Supplement on Assessment .

What educational methods are most effective at developing the dispositions, abilities and knowledge of a critical thinker? In a comprehensive meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies of strategies for teaching students to think critically, Abrami et al. (2015) found that dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring each increased the effectiveness of the educational intervention, and that they were most effective when combined. They also found that in these studies a combination of separate instruction in critical thinking with subject-matter instruction in which students are encouraged to think critically was more effective than either by itself. However, the difference was not statistically significant; that is, it might have arisen by chance.

Most of these studies lack the longitudinal follow-up required to determine whether the observed differential improvements in critical thinking abilities or dispositions continue over time, for example until high school or college graduation. For details on studies of methods of developing critical thinking skills and dispositions, see the Supplement on Educational Methods .

12. Controversies

Scholars have denied the generalizability of critical thinking abilities across subject domains, have alleged bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, and have investigated the relationship of critical thinking to other kinds of thinking.

McPeck (1981) attacked the thinking skills movement of the 1970s, including the critical thinking movement. He argued that there are no general thinking skills, since thinking is always thinking about some subject-matter. It is futile, he claimed, for schools and colleges to teach thinking as if it were a separate subject. Rather, teachers should lead their pupils to become autonomous thinkers by teaching school subjects in a way that brings out their cognitive structure and that encourages and rewards discussion and argument. As some of his critics (e.g., Paul 1985; Siegel 1985) pointed out, McPeck’s central argument needs elaboration, since it has obvious counter-examples in writing and speaking, for which (up to a certain level of complexity) there are teachable general abilities even though they are always about some subject-matter. To make his argument convincing, McPeck needs to explain how thinking differs from writing and speaking in a way that does not permit useful abstraction of its components from the subject-matters with which it deals. He has not done so. Nevertheless, his position that the dispositions and abilities of a critical thinker are best developed in the context of subject-matter instruction is shared by many theorists of critical thinking, including Dewey (1910, 1933), Glaser (1941), Passmore (1980), Weinstein (1990), Bailin et al. (1999b), and Willingham (2019).

McPeck’s challenge prompted reflection on the extent to which critical thinking is subject-specific. McPeck argued for a strong subject-specificity thesis, according to which it is a conceptual truth that all critical thinking abilities are specific to a subject. (He did not however extend his subject-specificity thesis to critical thinking dispositions. In particular, he took the disposition to suspend judgment in situations of cognitive dissonance to be a general disposition.) Conceptual subject-specificity is subject to obvious counter-examples, such as the general ability to recognize confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions. A more modest thesis, also endorsed by McPeck, is epistemological subject-specificity, according to which the norms of good thinking vary from one field to another. Epistemological subject-specificity clearly holds to a certain extent; for example, the principles in accordance with which one solves a differential equation are quite different from the principles in accordance with which one determines whether a painting is a genuine Picasso. But the thesis suffers, as Ennis (1989) points out, from vagueness of the concept of a field or subject and from the obvious existence of inter-field principles, however broadly the concept of a field is construed. For example, the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning hold for all the varied fields in which such reasoning occurs. A third kind of subject-specificity is empirical subject-specificity, according to which as a matter of empirically observable fact a person with the abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker in one area of investigation will not necessarily have them in another area of investigation.

The thesis of empirical subject-specificity raises the general problem of transfer. If critical thinking abilities and dispositions have to be developed independently in each school subject, how are they of any use in dealing with the problems of everyday life and the political and social issues of contemporary society, most of which do not fit into the framework of a traditional school subject? Proponents of empirical subject-specificity tend to argue that transfer is more likely to occur if there is critical thinking instruction in a variety of domains, with explicit attention to dispositions and abilities that cut across domains. But evidence for this claim is scanty. There is a need for well-designed empirical studies that investigate the conditions that make transfer more likely.

It is common ground in debates about the generality or subject-specificity of critical thinking dispositions and abilities that critical thinking about any topic requires background knowledge about the topic. For example, the most sophisticated understanding of the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning is of no help unless accompanied by some knowledge of what might be plausible explanations of some phenomenon under investigation.

Critics have objected to bias in the theory, pedagogy and practice of critical thinking. Commentators (e.g., Alston 1995; Ennis 1998) have noted that anyone who takes a position has a bias in the neutral sense of being inclined in one direction rather than others. The critics, however, are objecting to bias in the pejorative sense of an unjustified favoring of certain ways of knowing over others, frequently alleging that the unjustly favoured ways are those of a dominant sex or culture (Bailin 1995). These ways favour:

• reinforcement of egocentric and sociocentric biases over dialectical engagement with opposing world-views (Paul 1981, 1984; Warren 1998)
• distancing from the object of inquiry over closeness to it (Martin 1992; Thayer-Bacon 1992)
• indifference to the situation of others over care for them (Martin 1992)
• orientation to thought over orientation to action (Martin 1992)
• being reasonable over caring to understand people’s ideas (Thayer-Bacon 1993)
• being neutral and objective over being embodied and situated (Thayer-Bacon 1995a)
• doubting over believing (Thayer-Bacon 1995b)
• reason over emotion, imagination and intuition (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
• solitary thinking over collaborative thinking (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
• written and spoken assignments over other forms of expression (Alston 2001)
• attention to written and spoken communications over attention to human problems (Alston 2001)
• winning debates in the public sphere over making and understanding meaning (Alston 2001)

A common thread in this smorgasbord of accusations is dissatisfaction with focusing on the logical analysis and evaluation of reasoning and arguments. While these authors acknowledge that such analysis and evaluation is part of critical thinking and should be part of its conceptualization and pedagogy, they insist that it is only a part. Paul (1981), for example, bemoans the tendency of atomistic teaching of methods of analyzing and evaluating arguments to turn students into more able sophists, adept at finding fault with positions and arguments with which they disagree but even more entrenched in the egocentric and sociocentric biases with which they began. Martin (1992) and Thayer-Bacon (1992) cite with approval the self-reported intimacy with their subject-matter of leading researchers in biology and medicine, an intimacy that conflicts with the distancing allegedly recommended in standard conceptions and pedagogy of critical thinking. Thayer-Bacon (2000) contrasts the embodied and socially embedded learning of her elementary school students in a Montessori school, who used their imagination, intuition and emotions as well as their reason, with conceptions of critical thinking as

thinking that is used to critique arguments, offer justifications, and make judgments about what are the good reasons, or the right answers. (Thayer-Bacon 2000: 127–128)

Alston (2001) reports that her students in a women’s studies class were able to see the flaws in the Cinderella myth that pervades much romantic fiction but in their own romantic relationships still acted as if all failures were the woman’s fault and still accepted the notions of love at first sight and living happily ever after. Students, she writes, should

be able to connect their intellectual critique to a more affective, somatic, and ethical account of making risky choices that have sexist, racist, classist, familial, sexual, or other consequences for themselves and those both near and far… critical thinking that reads arguments, texts, or practices merely on the surface without connections to feeling/desiring/doing or action lacks an ethical depth that should infuse the difference between mere cognitive activity and something we want to call critical thinking. (Alston 2001: 34)

Some critics portray such biases as unfair to women. Thayer-Bacon (1992), for example, has charged modern critical thinking theory with being sexist, on the ground that it separates the self from the object and causes one to lose touch with one’s inner voice, and thus stigmatizes women, who (she asserts) link self to object and listen to their inner voice. Her charge does not imply that women as a group are on average less able than men to analyze and evaluate arguments. Facione (1990c) found no difference by sex in performance on his California Critical Thinking Skills Test. Kuhn (1991: 280–281) found no difference by sex in either the disposition or the competence to engage in argumentative thinking.

The critics propose a variety of remedies for the biases that they allege. In general, they do not propose to eliminate or downplay critical thinking as an educational goal. Rather, they propose to conceptualize critical thinking differently and to change its pedagogy accordingly. Their pedagogical proposals arise logically from their objections. They can be summarized as follows:

• Focus on argument networks with dialectical exchanges reflecting contesting points of view rather than on atomic arguments, so as to develop “strong sense” critical thinking that transcends egocentric and sociocentric biases (Paul 1981, 1984).
• Foster closeness to the subject-matter and feeling connected to others in order to inform a humane democracy (Martin 1992).
• Develop “constructive thinking” as a social activity in a community of physically embodied and socially embedded inquirers with personal voices who value not only reason but also imagination, intuition and emotion (Thayer-Bacon 2000).
• In developing critical thinking in school subjects, treat as important neither skills nor dispositions but opening worlds of meaning (Alston 2001).
• Attend to the development of critical thinking dispositions as well as skills, and adopt the “critical pedagogy” practised and advocated by Freire (1968 [1970]) and hooks (1994) (Dalgleish, Girard, & Davies 2017).

A common thread in these proposals is treatment of critical thinking as a social, interactive, personally engaged activity like that of a quilting bee or a barn-raising (Thayer-Bacon 2000) rather than as an individual, solitary, distanced activity symbolized by Rodin’s The Thinker . One can get a vivid description of education with the former type of goal from the writings of bell hooks (1994, 2010). Critical thinking for her is open-minded dialectical exchange across opposing standpoints and from multiple perspectives, a conception similar to Paul’s “strong sense” critical thinking (Paul 1981). She abandons the structure of domination in the traditional classroom. In an introductory course on black women writers, for example, she assigns students to write an autobiographical paragraph about an early racial memory, then to read it aloud as the others listen, thus affirming the uniqueness and value of each voice and creating a communal awareness of the diversity of the group’s experiences (hooks 1994: 84). Her “engaged pedagogy” is thus similar to the “freedom under guidance” implemented in John Dewey’s Laboratory School of Chicago in the late 1890s and early 1900s. It incorporates the dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring that Abrami (2015) found to be most effective in improving critical thinking skills and dispositions.

What is the relationship of critical thinking to problem solving, decision-making, higher-order thinking, creative thinking, and other recognized types of thinking? One’s answer to this question obviously depends on how one defines the terms used in the question. If critical thinking is conceived broadly to cover any careful thinking about any topic for any purpose, then problem solving and decision making will be kinds of critical thinking, if they are done carefully. Historically, ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving’ were two names for the same thing. If critical thinking is conceived more narrowly as consisting solely of appraisal of intellectual products, then it will be disjoint with problem solving and decision making, which are constructive.

Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives used the phrase “intellectual abilities and skills” for what had been labeled “critical thinking” by some, “reflective thinking” by Dewey and others, and “problem solving” by still others (Bloom et al. 1956: 38). Thus, the so-called “higher-order thinking skills” at the taxonomy’s top levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation are just critical thinking skills, although they do not come with general criteria for their assessment (Ennis 1981b). The revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al. 2001) likewise treats critical thinking as cutting across those types of cognitive process that involve more than remembering (Anderson et al. 2001: 269–270). For details, see the Supplement on History .

As to creative thinking, it overlaps with critical thinking (Bailin 1987, 1988). Thinking about the explanation of some phenomenon or event, as in Ferryboat , requires creative imagination in constructing plausible explanatory hypotheses. Likewise, thinking about a policy question, as in Candidate , requires creativity in coming up with options. Conversely, creativity in any field needs to be balanced by critical appraisal of the draft painting or novel or mathematical theory.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking (AILACT)
• Critical Thinking Across the European Higher Education Curricula (CRITHINKEDU)
• Critical Thinking Definition, Instruction, and Assessment: A Rigorous Approach
• Critical Thinking Research (RAIL)
• Foundation for Critical Thinking
• Insight Assessment
• Partnership for 21st Century Learning (P21)
• The Critical Thinking Consortium
• The Nature of Critical Thinking: An Outline of Critical Thinking Dispositions and Abilities , by Robert H. Ennis

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Chapter 1. What is Critical Thinking?

Learning Objectives

• Understand the power of questioning
• Understand what it means to be critical
• Understand the ways critical thinking is different from our mundane everyday thinking
• Appreciate the fundamental vulnerabilities of our everyday (untrained) thinking
• Recognise our broad (moral and social) obligation to be critical thinkers
• Recognise the central role of critical thinking to social and occupational success
• Understand the two steps to broad improving critical thinking: (1) examination and understanding, and (2) practice and application.

New Concepts to Master

• Socratic questioning
• Critical thinking versus everyday thinking
• Creative thinking
• Thinking as mental behaviour
• Living examined lives
• Concepts as tools/lenses.
• Post-truth era
• Fourth industrial revolution
• Attention economy

Chapter 1 Orientation

Let’s sketch out a road map for this chapter’s journey. In this first chapter, I have tried to focus on anticipating – and answering – questions that a curious (maybe even cynical) student might have as they begin this text. Some of these questions might seem very elementary, but progressing through these from the beginning will make sure we are all starting out on the same page. This might all feel like ‘cheerleading’ on my part on behalf of critical thinking, and that’s simply because it is. If I can convince you to take this content seriously and learn as much from it as you possibly can, you’ll benefit greatly.

Our first question will try and pin down what it is we’re looking at in this book.

Question 1: What is critical thinking?

Our second major question will address the issue of motivation and ask why we should even bother with learning and developing critical thinking.

Question 2: Why learn and practice critical thinking?

Our next question focuses on the broader context and the relevance of critical thinking in modern life, as well as the ever-changing workforce.

Question 3: Who should study critical thinking?

Our final question gets down to the practicalities.

Question 4: How do we improve our critical thinking?

This chapter’s content will also contain two side-tours into related topics. We will look at questions themselves and how they can be used to accelerate your learning and develop critical thinking skills. We will also look at the connection between creativity and critical thinking.

The Art and Power of Questioning

We will begin with one of our two side-tours for this chapter: the art and power of questioning. There are many reasons to focus on questions, but for your most immediate purposes, they’re going to be a huge ally for you during your university studies. For your success at university, questioning is both essential and constructive, and in fact, you might not accumulate much more after your first weeks of study than a long laundry list of questions. This is what we’d expect, so don’t stress about it. Answers will come in time, though you should ensure you’re tenacious in hunting them down, which is half the fun. If you find you’re only accumulating more and more questions during this early period of your university study, it means you’re probably doing something right: paying attention. Keep in mind, you’ll need to ensure you’re constantly reaching out to your peers, your lecturers and student support staff to get answers. Questions are powerful tools, but like any tool, they won’t help if you don’t put them to proper use. Questions are simply a means to an end – don’t hold on to them or get bogged down by them.

Another reason to spend some time thinking about questioning is that this simple everyday activity is central to critical thinking. In addition to critical thinking, all tertiary education should be a training ground for teaching you how to think, and questioning is a central and invaluable part of both learning and doing ‘thinking.’ Not only critical thinking, but any development of knowledge – such as scientific research – begins with a question. It’s how all of us learn. Failure to question is like having the brakes on the development of knowledge and understanding. Historically, this actually happened for hundreds of years when people through the Middle Ages failed to question the truths of the church and the teachings of Aristotle. Aristotle was an influential ancient Greek philosopher who founded science and invented logic, yet he was wrong about tons of stuff – he thought women had fewer teeth than men, he thought eels didn’t reproduce, etc. Yet, for thousands of years no one questioned Aristotle’s claim that of two objects the same size – like identically shaped bowling balls – a much heavier object would fall faster than a lighter object until Galileo disproved it almost 2000 years later.

There is a famous quote that goes ‘ Prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae ’, which means ‘to know what to ask is to already know half’ (I have tried to find the source of the quote and the best sources point to medieval philosopher Roger Bacon). Regardless, developing your skills at asking questions is half the journey to gaining knowledge and becoming a powerful thinker. German philosopher Immanuel Kant put this point as eloquently as ever (sagacity and insight means exceptionally smart stuff):

So the best advice I can give you at this early stage of your training in ‘thinking’ is to generate and ask plenty of questions, listen carefully to the questions posed by others, probe the answers you receive and use them to stimulate more questions. Normally, questions are something that just pop into our heads in an unconscious or automatic way. However, I’d like you to try a different approach and be active and creative in generating penetrating questions as a way to actually learn and discover more. Use questioning as a way to engage more with this book’s content, with your lecturers and with your peers. This will achieve several things: firstly, it will improve your own thinking, secondly, it will help you remember content better, and lastly, it will help you build relationships with other students and teaching staff. Questioning also boosts the thinking of others hearing or responding to your questions because questioning stimulates new ideas and nurtures creativity, which is another key concept you’ll be introduced to in this chapter.

This questioning approach to learning is what is called the ‘Socratic method’. Socrates is one of the greatest and most influential thinkers of all time, though he never actually taught anything or presented his own ideas directly. Instead, he saw himself as something like a midwife delivering knowledge as a baby. He would insistently draw information out of his students by repeatedly asking questions that forced them to clarify and deepen their own thinking. Socrates might be called the first great critical thinker. We will hear more about him later in the book.

Hopefully, this chapter’s content will help you clarify some of the questions you may have as you embark on studying this text, and if we are lucky, it may even answer some of them. But there is a broader purpose to structuring this chapter’s content around questioning. I hope to show you how systematic questions can guide and structure our thinking. In fact, this whole text is intended to help you learn how to ask the right kinds of questions and also how to interrogate the answers you receive, which is a skill that will serve you for the rest of your university studies – not to mention your life and career. Like most of the tools mentioned in this book, questioning can be learned and improved through practice. Perfecting this skill isn’t just worthwhile for you during your time as a student. The professional world is also becoming more and more aware of the power of questioning, so mastering this skill will empower you for greater success later in your career. Therefore, ask questions as though you’re practising the art of questioning itself and as you get better at questioning, you’re improving your critical thinking.

A final note on questions: some people have important questions that they never get around to asking because they’re uncertain if the questions are silly – and therefore, unimportant – but these are two very different things. I have never been the type of lecturer who likes to claim ‘There are no silly questions’ because, of course, there are plenty, and I have been responsible for asking many myself over the years. What is true, though, is that ‘There are no unimportant questions’. Even seemingly silly questions serve an important purpose because they can help clarify information, pinpoint where you might have gone off-track, and even aid other students who may not have realised there was a gap in their understanding. Any time you need clarification on a concept in this text (or any course content), you should reach out. Questions stimulate conversations, which help us think and learn. In other words, questioning is critical thinking.

What is critical thinking?

Let’s get onto the first major question for this chapter. Since the text is called ‘critical thinking’, clarifying what this is seems like an ideal place for us to start. Since the foundation of critical thinking is self-reflection and self-examination, start by reflecting on ‘What comes to mind when you hear the phrase “critical thinking”?’ Consider your own ideas about this first, and once we go over some of the more conventional conceptions, you can reflect on how your pre-existing understanding might compare with what we are learning in this chapter.

As you might guess, critical thinking means many different things in many different contexts, and to many different people. It’s actually impossible to find a definition that everyone agrees on. In fact, critical thinking has become something of a popular buzzword in education, science and academia. When concepts achieve a type of ‘trendy’ status, they sometimes lose their meaning and become impossible to get a handle on. Don’t worry, we are going to unpack it in this chapter.

It’s important for us to set out on this journey with a firm conceptual grounding on what exactly we are talking about when we use the phrase ‘critical thinking’. We can start our attempt to understand what this is by breaking it apart into its constituent words. So let’s look at the two words ‘thinking’ and ‘critical’ separately.

Let’s start with clarifying the notion of thinking. What is thinking? Thinking is an activity we are so intimately connected with that we risk having an unearned sense of certainty about our ability to define it. That is, until the point where we actually have to do so. This exact crisis of confidence hit me about five minutes before attempting to write this part of the chapter. It can be a bit like asking a fish to explain to you what water is. Nevertheless, to master critical thinking, it’s essential that we understand the thinking process itself.

Defining this ‘thinking’ that we all do constantly in specific terms has actually been quite a difficult problem throughout human history. Philosophers and psychologists have spent hundreds and even thousands of years pondering the nature and activities of thinking, and some very impressive and technical work has been done in this area, though we don’t have to delve so deep in our very first chapter.

Let’s start at the most obvious and basic points. Thinking is a mental activity that we can easily contrast with physical activities like walking. To state the obvious, a mental activity is an activity that happens inside our mind, and therefore, it’s private and internal (that is, until Elon Musk perfects his mind-reading device). [1] As an activity, it’s ‘active’, which just means it’s something that we actually do rather than something that happens to us – though it can sometimes feel like we do it unintentionally or unconsciously. Thinking is also one among many different types of mental activities or states. Others include perception, memory, emotions and daydreaming. Those of you who are studying psychology will learn a great deal about all of these throughout your degree, however, in this text, we will focus on thinking specifically. Many mental activities come under the umbrella term ‘cognition’, which you’ll come across many times in your study. The terms ‘cognition’ and ‘thinking’ are sometimes used interchangeably, but it’s clearer to use cognition as a broader term to encompass many related mental processes – those like perception, thinking, learning, language, and memory.

Tackling tricky definitions is often helped by compiling a list of things that we agree belong under a term (i.e. the instances of the thing we are trying to define) as well as things that don’t. By sorting cases like this, we can abstractly identify what they have in common. We’ve already started to do this above by identifying some mental activities that we wouldn’t consider thinking. In contrast to these non-thinking activities like perception, emotion and memory, mental activities that most people consider ‘thinking’ include decision-making, calculating, planning, active comprehension of complex material, judgement and problem-solving. We can work out what might be common among these examples and tentatively conclude that thinking involves some type of mental manipulation or processing of information, symbols and/or ideas. This idea of processing or manipulation is just another way of saying we are actually ‘doing’ something to, or with, the information and ideas.

As I said before, thinking might not always be intentional or conscious, but we can see from the above list of activities that it can be quite active, strategic and skilful (or not, depending on your training). Since it isn’t just any type of thinking that interests us in this text, but critical thinking, we should get clearer on what this critical type of thinking refers to.

In everyday conversation, the word critical is used in many different ways. In one sense, to be critical means to criticise. People often confuse being critical with being judgmental or even disapproving, such as pointing out the flaws in someone or something. Critical thinking isn’t all about criticising, which can be more like a negative, thoughtless knee-jerk reaction to things we don’t like – the opposite of critical thinking.

A more general and appropriate use of the term would be to represent an analytical and interpretative activity, such as how a thoughtful and attentive art critic views a painting. Good art critics don’t reactively jump to conclusions or naively pour scorn on artworks. They carefully and methodically consider the piece of art and make a thoughtful and reasoned evaluation of it. In this sense, being critical has nothing to do with being unnecessarily negative, but rather is a skilful way of viewing things methodically in a careful and evaluative way. Therefore, being critical is a good thing. To do this requires the use of a range of mental tools that we will discuss as we progress throughout the text. When it comes to thinking, being critical means to be analytical and reflective of the thinking process itself as well as our ideas and beliefs, and doing this in a purposeful and systematic way. In fact, we can be critical about almost anything, and we can apply critical thinking skills and tools to just about any topic or area of our life.

This description suggests that being critical isn’t something that’s likely to be innate – meaning we aren’t automatically born with it. Rather, it’s something that’s acquired and then developed, often over many years. Only skilled analysis and examinations will actually produce useful evaluations and interpretations, and only training and practice can ensure our analysis and examination are done skilfully rather than error-prone or haphazardly. To be successful in your critical approach means you need to be careful and deliberate, and this requires training. A second aspect that should become apparent at this point is that critical thinking isn’t the kind of thinking we do when we aren’t trying. Not only is being critical learned rather than inborn, but it’s also not our default mode of thinking until we make a habit of it.

Critical thinking

Now we have a handle on what thinking is, and we know a bit about what critical means, we can determine several things.

Firstly, thinking is a distinct kind of internal mental activity.

Secondly, being critical is a special skilful mode of thinking (since not all thinking is critical). It has specific attributes such as being active, purposeful, careful, evaluative, open, methodical, reasoned, etc. We’ll go over these attributes and others as we progress through this text.

Thirdly, critical thinking skills are learnable, perfectible and must be deliberately cultivated and performed (i.e. they’re neither inborn nor automatic).

For comparison, non-critical thinking would include the kind of thinking we do when we’re on autopilot and our mind is flitting from one thought to another without any real goal, and without us being very aware or deliberate about it.

The following nested Venn diagram is a useful way to think about what we’ve covered so far. It shows how we’ve located critical thinking as a specific subtype of thinking, which is a specific subtype of mental activity, which is a specific subtype of human behaviour. In this way, you can situate the focus of this information in your broader understanding of these topics. This will be especially useful for helping students studying psychology degrees to locate the focus of the current content in relation to their other courses, which will focus on other aspects of this diagram.

Some Established Definitions (for Completeness)

These descriptions will start to feel quite familiar at this point.

One of the most influential accounts of critical thinking describes it as active and skilful and involves interpretation and evaluation activities applied to information, observation, and communication (Fisher & Scriven, 1997, p21). This definition is useful in identifying some of the targets to which critical thinking can be applied. These are:

• observations
• communications
• information

In navigating our daily lives, being critical of the information and observations we make is indispensable to our success.

From a cognitive psychology perspective, Halpern (2003, p. 6) explains that critical thinking is the application of a set of cognitive skills or strategies directed towards achieving an outcome. On this account, critical thinking is a reasoned activity employed purposefully with some objective in mind. This definition highlights another aspect of critical thinking that I haven’t mentioned yet: that it’s goal-directed and goal-oriented. This means critical thinking is engaged to produce a certain outcome, whether that be an interpretation, a decision, an action, or a solution to a problem. We need to engage our critical thinking to determine how to properly understand what’s going on, whether we can believe what we’re being told, how to act and how to achieve our goals.

Though it may seem straightforward, defining critical thinking has been the subject of quite a bit of debate. A research study was even conducted with ‘experts’ to try and reach a consensus as to what critical thinking is all about. You can read about their results and decisions in The Delphi Report . [2]

Critical ‘versus/and’ Creative Thinking

This section will cover our second side-tour of this chapter: Creativity versus critical thinking. Since these two concepts are rarely spoken about in the same breath, you’d be forgiven for wondering: ‘What has creativity got to do with critical thinking?’. But I hope to show you how the two are, in fact, very closely linked, and even interdependent. Earlier in this chapter, I’ve started to answer the question ‘What is critical thinking?’, so hopefully you’re up to speed on that.

Since this is meant to be an intellectual discussion, let’s begin by outlining some definitions of creativity. One popular definition by Robert E. Franken (1994, p. 396) highlights two important things. Firstly, it emphasises that the acts of ‘creation’ and ‘recognition’ of (1) ideas, (2) alternatives and (3) possibilities are creative acts. Therefore, recognition of novelty (or new things) is creative, just as generating novelty is. It also identifies some of the areas where creativity is most useful: problem-solving, communication, and entertainment. We’re quite familiar with the role of creativity in producing entertainment products (such as in music, film, art, and dance etc.) but we may be less aware of how instrumental creativity is in our simple daily activities of communication and problem-solving.

Another good definition that ties in well with critical thinking activities is provided from Ghuman and Aswathappa (2010, p. 540). They explain that, in addition to generating new ideas, creativity involves challenging assumptions and viewing things from alternate perspectives. Here we are getting even closer to key tasks involved in critical thinking. Yet again, many people may not recognise the essential need for creativity in the act of challenging assumptions or beliefs, seeing things from a range of different viewpoints, and developing new ideas. It may not be obvious that these are actually creative acts.

The first thing that’s apparent from these definitions is that creativity is much more than painting a picture or writing a song. It’s, in fact, a fairly commonplace day-to-day type of activity. It isn’t some magical or mystical power that only a few geniuses possess. We all have it to some extent, and the extent to which we have it depends on some inborn inclination (including being interested in creative pursuits) but is also determined by our interests, experience, and training. All individuals possess creativity, or we would be essentially immobilised in our life – we never would have overcome the first hurdle that we came to.

The common misconception that critical and creative thinking are unrelated or even incompatible types of thinking is based on dodgy old-fashioned stereotypes. You may have heard the very common ‘right brain versus left brain’ myth, which claims the two sides of the brain favour different functions, with the left being for analytical, rational, and logical functions and the right being for creativity. Some people even believe that some individuals are exclusively ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’ in their tendency to be analytical and creative. Well, these claims are simply not true at all. Both of these myths have been debunked. Both hemispheres of the brain work in concert to produce critical and creative thinking, and we are all both left-brained and right-brained people.

As we’ve seen from the previous definitions, creativity is actually indispensable to many steps in critical thinking. The ability to think imaginatively about a situation and problem, and to come up with new ideas, perspectives, and insights is essential to critical thinking. Creativity gives us the ability to see a situation and a problem in a new light and generate new solutions – or view and use old solutions in a new way. Good critical thinking depends on mental flexibility and innovation, which are features of creativity. We saw previously that critical thinking is a goal-directed activity, which means that it’s used to achieve something specific. Whether the goal is to produce an interpretation, an evaluation, a decision, an explanation, an action, or solving a problem, your degree of success will be determined by how creative you can be at generating a range of options to consider.

Imagine you’re a songwriter in a band, and you’re putting together some guitar riffs. As you go about choosing notes and arranging them and perfecting the tempo, the rhythm, and the structure of the piece of music, you need to be constantly appraising the work. You must review each step and critically evaluate it and how it serves the piece of music. This process of analysis, reasoning, and problem-solving as you’re being creative is nothing other than active critical thinking.

Now imagine you’re an investigative journalist looking into political corruption. As you gather information and evaluate its credibly and usefulness, you’ll need to be able to generate a range of alternative explanations for events. You’ll need to use imagination to view the information and people from a range of different perspectives. You’ll need to be innovative in your approaches to investigation to circumvent the obstacles put in your path. You’ll need to see how the pieces fit together, find hidden patterns, make novel connections between things, and experiment with new ideas and hypotheses about what’s going on.

In this way, a critical thinking activity relies heavily on creativity to be successful. They’re highly interdependent and very similar skill sets. Creativity enhances critical thinking, and critical thinking enhances creativity. Both skill sets share another similar feature in that they can both be learned and developed. All it takes is self-reflection (watching how you think and how you create is the starting point) and some practice. So, learn these skills and then get practising. Just like a weightlifter building muscles, repetition and dedication are the keys.

Before we leave off on this side-tour, I thought it only fair that I give you some preliminary practical strategies to improve your creativity. Things you can start doing right now to be a more creative person, and by extension, a better critical thinker. The first thing you need to begin is to understand that creativity is a skill that you need to practice (I know I’m repeating myself but squashing this myth is the first step to being more creative). Like other complex skills, and like critical thinking, you can’t get more skilful at it if you don’t dedicate yourself to practice.

Strategies to Improve Creative Thinking

In order to improve your creative thinking, you need to start with increased awareness and exposure. Start to pay attention to how you think, how you create, how you tackle problems, how you generate ideas, and how you expose yourself to ideas. An uncreative monotone environment is just not conducive to creativity. Do you live in an echo chamber of ideas and input? Notice how many new ideas you expose yourself to. Whether that be in the form of different news channels, TV shows, books, podcasts, social media content pages (these are actually orchestrated to only provide you with input you have engaged with before or input that confirms what you already believe). Creativity feeds off new and challenging ideas, new and challenging viewpoints, and new and challenging perspectives. If you live your life only digesting and parroting the opinions of your favourite ‘thought leaders’, you’re not an independent thinker. In fact, your voice and thinking has merely been co-opted and ventriloquised by other people or agendas. Check whether your opinions align in every way with any major political or ideological position. If so, there’s a chance you’ve been ideologically captivated. For example, if knowing one of your opinions (for example, on gun control) allows me to easily predict all your other positions on important topics (for example, abortion or immigration), you may not be as independent a thinker as you might believe.

The solution is to try to expose yourself to input you aren’t used to or even disagree with. Genuinely try to put yourself in the shoes and inhabit the worlds of new and different people. People you don’t like or disagree with – even including fictional characters. As you go about this, notice the limits you put on yourself and your influences. Read, listen, watch, and converse widely with others outside the genres you’re used to and expose yourself to as many different viewpoints as possible. Challenge yourself to regularly do something different that you haven’t done before. It doesn’t have to be skydiving – it might just be to drive down a road you haven’t been down before or cook a dish you haven’t tried before.

After practising some introspection and raising your awareness, as well as scrutinising your ‘environment of ideas’, it’s time to take the plunge and start practising the art of creation. In this step, you simply rehearse generating new ideas, perspectives, and solutions. This practice is intended to be playful, so don’t be too serious about it. You can apply this to anything:

• How many uses of a kitchen item can you think of?
• How many activities can you list to do if time and money were not an issue?
• How many solutions can you come up with for a fictitious problem – the crazier, the better!

This is the classic blackboard method for releasing our creativity from the confines of everyday conventional thinking. The point here is just to practice loosening up our thinking and learn about ourselves as we go about doing this. The aim of this exercise is to produce long lists, not good lists – or diverse quantity over quality. During this practice, notice the automatic tendency to immediately evaluate and even belittle certain ideas. You may notice yourself reflecting on items in the list saying, ‘That’s dumb!’, ‘That’s impractical!’, ‘That won’t work!’, ‘That’s too much like the other options!’, etc. A key part of this exercise is to pick up on this internal monologue. It’s natural and everyone does it, and it’s part of how we evolved to survive by making instantaneous evaluative decisions. We all have an internal ‘voice of criticism’ that likes to provide negative running commentary, ruining our creative pursuits. Part of this exercise is intended to minimise the influence of this voice of criticism during the creation stage. Recognising and relaxing this knee-jerk, reactive ‘criticism’ is an essential step in becoming more creative. At this point, suspend all judgement and be crazy and outlandish in your ideas. Evaluation of ideas can come later, but there’s no place for condemnation when we’re simply generating ideas. Evaluation throttles creativity. Here is where repetition is so important. The more practice you get in generating options, ideas, pathways, uses, activities, solutions, etc. the better you’ll be at it.

Because of the overlap between critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving, we’ll cover additional strategies in later chapters that deal with these neighbouring topics.

Why Learn and Practice Critical Thinking?

We’ve spent some time previously discussing what critical thinking is, so now it’s time to address the why question. One of the most common questions students have at the beginning of any course is ‘Why is this information necessary or important?’. Most students rightfully want to know why they’re investing their time in this stuff, and what is to be gained by studying thinking. Luckily for me, there are excellent answers when it comes to learning critical thinking, and I think by now, you’ll be able to anticipate many of them yourself.

Before we launch into my reasons, we should absorb some wise words from theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, who acknowledges that we mustn’t fool ourselves, as we are the easiest to fool.

To me, this quote [3] sums up the overall spirit motivating us to engage with critical thinking. The only thing I’d add to this is that while we’re very adept at fooling ourselves, we can also never underestimate how susceptible we are to being fooled by other people – especially those who know how to think and communicate in more clever and sneaky ways than ourselves. We have a swarm of in-built vulnerabilities in our perception, thinking, and decision-making that we’ll cover in detail later in the text, and these are well-known to hustlers and charlatans of all types. Becoming an expert critical thinker is the best way to arm yourself against those who seek to exploit our in-built vulnerabilities to lie to, cheat, and steal from us. As Feynman aptly puts it, one of the people looking to do this is our very own sly selves. We’ve all suffered that horrible feeling of annoyance at ourselves after talking ourselves into doing, believing, or buying something against our better judgement.

Now on to the detailed reasons. I previously gave three primary reasons to study and improve your critical thinking skills:

• Firstly, thinking affects every aspect of our lives. We can’t avoid doing it, so we may as well do it well.
• Secondly, we’re not innately or automatically good at thinking. This comes as a surprise to most of us.
• And third, we have something of a social and moral obligation to be good at critical thinking. It isn’t all about us!

Let’s go over each of these in turn.

Thinking Infects Every Aspect of our Life

We’re almost always thinking in some way. In fact, one of the hardest things to do is to stop thinking for any extended period of time. We spend almost 24 hours of the day engaged in some form of thinking. When sleeping, we think; having a shower, we think; when we’re eating, we think – hopefully you’re thinking while studying these chapters! From birth to death, thinking is the foundation of almost everything we do, and the degree of success we have in life is influenced a great deal by how good we are at thinking.

So, the first answer to the question of ‘Why study critical thinking?’ is simply because thinking infects everything we do, and every aspect of our lives. Aside from breathing, perhaps, what else could be more important to be good at?

Research studies have shown that critical thinking ability is an even better predictor of life decisions than intelligence [4] , and also, that better critical thinking predicts wellbeing and longevity. [5] In other words, after mastering this text, you’ll experience fewer bad things in life, you’ll be happier, and you’ll live longer – now that’s a sales pitch! This is especially good news for dummies like me. It means that no matter how smart you are, being good at critical thinking can improve your life. Intelligence still plays a minor role, but it’s actually quite difficult to do much about that, whereas critical thinking is very malleable, which means it’s changeable and can be improved. Of course, intelligence can help with critical thinking and vice versa, but interestingly, there’s only about a 14 per cent [6] overlap in individual variation in intelligence and critical thinking ability, which is quite encouraging.

We are not Automatically Good at Thinking

Let’s look at our second reason for improving critical thinking. At first blush, our inability to think very well might seem counterintuitive. How could we be bad at something we do all day and have been doing our entire life? Doesn’t ‘practice make perfect?’ In the case of skilful technical activities, practice does not make perfect at all. In fact, practice only reinforces and ingrains bad techniques and habits.

Thinking about other skilful practices can help make sense of this. Martial arts are a good example. Practising a technique incorrectly for 1,000 repetitions doesn’t make you any better at the move. One of my favourite coaches once said, ‘Every time you practice a move less than perfectly, you get a little worse at it. Every time you practice a move perfectly, you get a little better at it’. This was from Ryan Hall who is a UFC fighter and former Brazilian Jiujitsu world champion. Thinking is a lot like this.

Don’t worry, it isn’t all doom-and-gloom. As I pointed out earlier, critical thinking is a collection of skills that are very learnable and can be cultivated through practice. However, without learning and practice, we’re simply not automatically active, purposeful, careful, open, evaluative, methodical, reasoned thinkers. One of the first steps to being more critical in our thinking is just to recognise that our natural default approaches to thinking are less than optimal. And calling them ‘less than optimal is being generous’. They can actually be quite disastrous as we fall victim to a thousand blind spots, biases and prejudices, and sloppy gullible habits. Through practice, we can sharpen and strengthen our critical thinking skills, the same way a weightlifter develops strength through repetitions (I keep coming back to this analogy to really drive home the need for repetitive practice).

Another selling point to critical thinking is the generality, applicability, and scope of these skills. This means critical thinking isn’t restricted to one specific content or subject area. You can apply the skills you learn in this text to any area of your study, your work, or your life. Most of your undergraduate courses will focus almost exclusively on subject knowledge that can rapidly go out-of-date. For example, textbooks on emotion, psychopathology, cognition, and counselling that existed when I was a student 10 years ago are now long out-of-date. In contrast, the knowledge and skills you learn in this text won’t just outlast the subject knowledge you learn in psychology, but will make you better able to properly absorb new information and be more likely to succeed in any discipline with such fast-changing knowledge. Sharpened critical thinking skills can aid you in properly judging the credibility of new claims in your own field, and also in appraising claims in other fields that you don’t necessarily have a lot of knowledge in. My PhD supervisor always said to me that university study wasn’t about memorising facts, but about perfecting students’ ‘bull… detector’.

Living an Examined Life

Let’s look at the idea of living an examined life. From the above two points, you can see that there is much to be gained personally by developing your critical thinking skills. In general, you can think of life with critical thinking skills as a more examined existence as you introspect, evaluate, and interpret yourself and the things around you with a much sharper set of lenses. The Ancient Athenian philosopher Socrates (who we’ve come across already in this text) went even further and actually claimed that an unexamined life wasn’t even worth living. This famous saying was delivered by Socrates while he was on death row, and it highlights the necessity of self-reflection and self-scrutiny in giving meaning to our lives. The Athenians had a gutful of his preachy-ness and sentenced him to death. The point is that to maximise the potential of our lives to be meaningful, we need to think deeply, intentionally, and be open-minded and inquisitive about our own thinking. If I were to extend this advice to one of the core messages of this text, I would say that ‘Unexamined assumptions are not worth holding or believing’ since they can only wreak havoc on our thinking and lives. Socrates would advise that we question all our assumptions daily, and this practice has to start by actually figuring out what they are.

In this way, critical thinking is a type of disposition or attitude we can adopt and apply to improve the overall quality of our life. We should continually examine our beliefs, assumptions, information, and values to ensure we’re maximising our thinking power.

An Obligation to be Critical Thinkers

Critical thinking isn’t just about improving our own lives. We actually have something of a moral and social obligation to be critical thinkers. In addition to the reasons I’ve already listed, that mostly involve the way the condition of our lives can be improved by critical thinking, we also have obligations outside ourselves. In other words, there are important altruistic, in addition to self-serving, reasons to improve our critical thinking. To be contributing citizens in a modern democratic society, we actually need to be able to think critically about the issues that matter to us and the people we care about. In line with living an examined life, we need to be clear about our own values, our motives, and the reasoning behind them. Our families, communities, and democratic societies actually depend on us as citizens to be able to carefully reflect on a wide range of issues, critically appraise information and arguments, judiciously weigh options, and to act and vote according to our values for the best outcome. In the digital age where we spend a huge chunk of our lives on social media, it’s more important than ever that we engage with ideas from a critical standpoint. This makes critical thinking training a social obligation as well as a tool for self-improvement.

Who Should Study Critical Thinking?

The short answer to the question of who should study critical thinking is ‘Anyone who thinks.’. A slightly longer answer might be ‘Anyone who wants to be successful in study, career, relationships, and anything in life.’. The point to these simplistic answers is that it’s unlikely anyone wouldn’t benefit somehow from training their critical thinking skills. The moral of the story here is that if you think, and your thinking impacts you (which is to say everyone), then you’d benefit from thinking better.

As Canadian clinical psychologist and professor Dr Jordan Peterson explains in his guide to writing essays :

Those who can think and communicate are simply more powerful than those who cannot, and powerful in the good way, the way that means “able to do a wide range of things competently and efficiently.” Furthermore, the further up the ladder of competence you climb, with your well-formulated thoughts, the more important thinking and communicating become. … So, unless you want to stay an ignorant, unhealthy lightweight, learn to write (and to think and communicate). Otherwise those who can will ride roughshod over you and push you out of the way. Your life will be harder, at the bottom of the dominance hierarchies that you will inevitably inhabit, and you will get old fast.

Therefore, a more selfish-sounding answer to who should study critical thinking might be ‘Whoever wants to actually get ahead, be successful, be persuasive, make a difference, and generally win at life’.

I’ve reiterated many times so far that critical thinking is a complex skill that’s learnable and trainable, but requires dedicated practice. You won’t get much better at it just by reading this textbook, without doing any actual practice. Unlike some highly technical skills such as flying a fighter jet or coordinating rover landings on Mars, critical thinking is an equal-opportunity skill set that anyone can improve with the right information and commitment.

Contrary to popular opinion, most of the thoughtless things people do aren’t really due to a lack of intelligence – though there is something deeply satisfying about concluding that other people are ‘simply morons’. We all have that unique human knack for doing stupid things. I’ve searched the house for 30 minutes looking for my glasses, only to realise that I was wearing them. I’ve even scrambled around in bed searching for my phone in the dark, aided by the light from the phone screen. One fateful day, I was shaving and decided to clean the end of my razor with my finger by swiping across it. I haven’t made that mistake twice. I like to believe I’m not alone in committing these kinds of goofs. My wife particularly enjoys the meme trend ‘Why women live longer than men’, which shows photographs of men doing a range of ridiculous things – mostly involving ladders. These misadventures can be chalked up to a combination of bravado and a general absence of careful thinking.  While they’re mostly trivial and funny, there’s a more serious side to failures in careful thinking. Reading through the list of winners of the aptly-named ‘ Darwin Awards ’ is a great way to scare yourself ‘smart’ and motivate you into some serious thinking training. As the name implies, these awards commemorate those who improve our gene pool–by removing themselves from it in the most spectacular way possible. In these cases, the goofs end up costing the poor chumps their lives. These tragic failures of thinking illustrate that while the actions are most definitely thoughtless, the people who commit them are not necessarily unintelligent, but just like everyone, they’re very prone to not being careful and meticulous in their thinking. As I have said before, critical thinking isn’t our natural default mode of thinking. For this reason, thinking skills are something that everyone could benefit from working on. It may even save their life.

Critical Thinking in Modern Society and the Workplace

Let’s consider the role of critical thinking in modern society and the workplace. Critical thinking skills are becoming more and more important in our fast-paced, media-saturated, and increasingly politicised information landscape. [7] Never before have we been inundated with so much information, news, opinions, options, and ideas. And never before has this type of downpour been so rapid – almost instantaneous. Sometimes, the flood of data seems impossible to escape. As a result, it has never been so important to have fine-tuned and razor-sharp thinking skills with which to navigate this environment. These changes in our information landscape have been dramatic and swift, and are set to accelerate into the future. Presently, there is too much information, news, and commentary to absorb and process, and so we have to make daily choices about who we expose ourselves to and who we ignore. As I emphasised previously, we all need to be very careful not to box ourselves into being exposed only to sources that share our worldviews and our political or religious perspectives. This is quite a modern problem in the grander scheme of human history. Within the space of about 80 years, the population of the world has gone from being mostly illiterate to active users of the internet – the greatest information source ever created. [8] This is quite a shocking change in such a short time. No more than 80 years ago, more than half of the people on the planet couldn’t even read or write, and today the majority of adults in the world are active internet users – not simply have internet access but are active users of it. And yet, despite this surge in engagement with information among the majority of people, we’re living in what has been nicknamed a ‘post-truth era’.

Sadly, our post-truth era has devastating consequences. We now have to grapple with a host of social, economic, and environmental problems that are caused by a lack of critical thinking. To cite only a couple of examples from Jeff Jason, we live in an age where we must deal with unvaccinated populations nurturing the spread of previously eradicated diseases, and an age in which NASA needs to publicly state that Mars is actually not a secret child labour slave colony. [9] The only way to get humanity back on track is training more people in critical thinking.

We’re bombarded from all directions with a dizzying avalanche of information and ideas, and amid this storm, it’s more urgent than ever that we practice skilled and active interpretation and evaluation of observation, communication, information, and argumentation. In plainer terms, we need critical thinking to filter useful signals from all the noise. Currently, the signal-to-noise ratio is largely unknown, but it’s safe to say that most of what we encounter is useless noise – or even worse, is unwanted, biased, rhetorical propaganda, clickbait, and agenda-driven ‘news’. Without critical thinking, there’s no way to determine how much of the information you’re bombarded with is actually useful and accurate – that is, there’s no way to reliably pinpoint the meaningful signals.

It isn’t that this challenge is completely new to humankind, but it’s becoming more and more urgent as the volume of information and rhetoric accumulates and accelerates daily. Your attention is a hot commodity in the twenty-first century, as a thousand corporations and interests vie to secure your engagement in their products. You’re the target of a billion-dollar arms race for your opinion, your engagement, and ultimately, your clicks and votes. This new business model (some are referring to it as an ‘attention economy’) has led to media companies employing teams of cognitive scientists, social scientists, and statisticians to calibrate their media platforms in a way that ensures they have the best chance of hypnotising you and manipulating your human vulnerabilities (mostly through emotion manipulation) to keep you glued to their content. This is addiction science weaponised to seduce the masses so they can make your attention a commodity for them to sell to other third-party companies.

Be aware that the information you consume has almost always been heavily processed, and processed information is just as bad for you mentally as processed food is for you physically – and I would argue, it’s even more addictive. Part of your homework for this chapter is to listen to the discussion about ‘What is technology doing to us?’ on the Making Sense Podcast with Sam Harris. [10] The bottom line is to learn to think critically, or risk becoming a victim to these forces.

In broader commercial terms, information itself is a major commodity in the twenty-first century global economy. This is why people call it the ‘Information Age’. We’re entering what is being called the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ [11] , which has at its heart information and information technologies. And all the while, it’s becoming less and less clear what actually counts as information. One result of this is that employers are becoming more sensitive to the importance of critical thinking among their employees. Dedicated manuals and guides have now been developed specifically for business to adopt critical thinking approaches. In fact, critical thinking is now considered one of the primary skill sets required for success in many industries. [12]

Not too long ago, the top ten skills were ranked by global employers and half of them relate directly to critical thinking. Rounding out the top three are complex problem-solving and creativity, both of which are actually core components of critical thinking and will be covered in this text. Not surprisingly, of the top ten skills listed, half of them relate directly to critical thinking as we will conceptualise it in this book.

For example, number 1 (complex problem-solving), number 2 (critical thinking), number 3 (creativity), number 7 (judgement and decision-making), and number 10 (cognitive flexibility) are all part of our broader conception of critical thinking and will be covered in this text.

Top 10 skills identified by the World Economic Forum :

• Complex Problem-Solving
• Critical Thinking
• People Management
• Coordinating with Others
• Emotional Intelligence
• Judgement and Decision-Making
• Service Orientation
• Negotiation
• Cognitive Flexibility.

I realise that the answer to the question that motivated this section ‘Who should study critical thinking?’ has now trespassed on the content of the previous section ‘Why study critical thinking?’, but the two answers are very closely intertwined. There are so many advantages to studying critical thinking that any time I talk about particular applications, it will seem like I’m just in ‘sales’ mode again. In all honesty, there really are no downsides to working on a critical thinking toolset. That’s probably all the hyping you’re willing to put up with from me this early in the text, so I’ll curb my enthusiasm here.

How is Critical Thinking Improved?

We can’t leave the first chapter without mapping out, in broad strokes, how critical thinking is developed and improved. We have the entire book to get into the nitty-gritty, but here we can outline the broad steps that are involved.

Just like repairing a car engine, the first step in improving your critical thinking involves examination and understanding. To bridge the gap between our current state of thinking and our goal state (which is critical thinking), we need three pieces of information:

• We need to understand our current state of thinking.
• We need to understand what the goal state looks like.
• We need to know how to progress from our current to the ideal state.

Therefore, the beginning of critical thinking is self-reflection and awareness. Simply put, we need to think about thinking itself. To achieve our ends, there’s quite a bit of theory to be covered in the book, and some effort at being mindful will be required. The chapters in this text will outline more about thinking, how it operates, and how/why it goes awry. This first step then is all about knowledge and comprehension, which is a necessary launching pad to being able to ‘do’ critical thinking.

The second step is practice and application. This is as important as theoretical learning, but it’s often overlooked. You need to exercise your critical thinking muscles for them to strengthen. This means actively practising what you’ve learned as you go about your day. Thinking is practice, not just theory. Like the martial arts analogy I used above, critical thinking is a comparably disciplined art. Both are complex skill sets that cannot be mastered by mere theoretical learning. You might actually die if you enter a UFC fight having only read an instruction manual on how to fight. Critical thinking is a similar in that your ability will only improve with dedicated practice. In addition, you should be attentive and open to new opportunities to practice what is being taught in each chapter.

This book will attempt to cover both steps with lots of theoretical information on thinking better, but also with activities for you to do along the way so that you can practice and master the skills. Don’t fall for the temptation to skip practical exercises, as the effort you put into these will pay off.

Final Word for Chapter 1

Let me leave the last word for capturing the sentiment of this chapter – and also this whole textbook – to Voltaire, who is considered one of the greatest writers in history.

Let’s arm ourselves with an arsenal of powerful critical thinking tools, and begin deconstructing the edifices of superstition and ignorance that are the impetus behind this fanaticism.

Additional Resources

Fallacy posters and flashcards

Print and/or study the fallacy posters and flashcards:

• The logical fallacies
• Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies
• FUN FACT: This is actually happening according to a very interesting neuroscientist I had the pleasure of hearing speak: Dr Divya Chandler . It’s called Brain Hacking ↵
• Facione, P.A. (1990). The Delphi Report. The California Academic Press. [1998 printing]. ↵
• Feynman, R. (1974). Cargo Cult Science . Engineering and Science. June, p. 12, para. 6. ↵
• Butler, H. A., Pentoney, C., & Bong, M. P. (2017). Predicting real-world outcomes: Critical thinking ability is a better predictor of life decisions than intelligence. Thinking Skills and Creativity. 25, 38–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2017.06.00 ↵
• Grossmann, I., Na, J., Varnum, M. E. W., Kitayama, S., & Nisbett, R. E. (2013). A route to well-being: Intelligence versus wise reasoning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142(3), 944–953. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029560 ↵
• Butler, H. A., Pentoney, C., & Bong, M. P. (2017). Predicting real-world outcomes: Critical thinking ability is a better predictor of life decisions than intelligence. Thinking Skills and Creativity. 25, 38–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2017.06.005 ↵
• The world may have always been politicised, and information has always been a political tool. but never before have there been so many people interacting with, and influenced by this process. ↵
• In 1940, 58 per cent of the world couldn’t read and write. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/09/reading-writing-global-literacy-rate-changed/ ↵
• Jason, J. (2017, August 10). Confirmation bias making you dumber, and what to do about it. Medium. https://medium.com/@umassthrower/confirmation-bias-sucks-a7bc989d3fd2 ↵
• Harris, S. (Host). (2017, April 15). What is technology doing to us? (No. 71) [Audio podcast episode]. In Making Sense. https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/71-technology-us ↵
• Schwab, K. (2016, January 16). The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond ↵
• Ranked by the 100 largest global employers in target industry sectors (as classified by the World Economic Forum), published in the 2016 The Future of Jobs report. ↵

MASTERING THINKING Copyright © 2024 by University of Southern Queensland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Critical Thinking Definition, Skills, and Examples

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Critical thinking refers to the ability to analyze information objectively and make a reasoned judgment. It involves the evaluation of sources, such as data, facts, observable phenomena, and research findings.

Good critical thinkers can draw reasonable conclusions from a set of information, and discriminate between useful and less useful details to solve problems or make decisions. These skills are especially helpful at school and in the workplace, where employers prioritize the ability to think critically. Find out why and see how you can demonstrate that you have this ability.

Examples of Critical Thinking

The circumstances that demand critical thinking vary from industry to industry. Some examples include:

• A triage nurse analyzes the cases at hand and decides the order by which the patients should be treated.
• A plumber evaluates the materials that would best suit a particular job.
• An attorney reviews the evidence and devises a strategy to win a case or to decide whether to settle out of court.
• A manager analyzes customer feedback forms and uses this information to develop a customer service training session for employees.

Why Do Employers Value Critical Thinking Skills?

Employers want job candidates who can evaluate a situation using logical thought and offer the best solution.

Someone with critical thinking skills can be trusted to make decisions independently, and will not need constant handholding.

Hiring a critical thinker means that micromanaging won't be required. Critical thinking abilities are among the most sought-after skills in almost every industry and workplace. You can demonstrate critical thinking by using related keywords in your resume and cover letter and during your interview.

How to Demonstrate Critical Thinking in a Job Search

If critical thinking is a key phrase in the job listings you are applying for, be sure to emphasize your critical thinking skills throughout your job search.

Add Keywords to Your Resume

You can use critical thinking keywords (analytical, problem solving, creativity, etc.) in your resume. When describing your work history, include top critical thinking skills that accurately describe you. You can also include them in your resume summary, if you have one.

For example, your summary might read, “Marketing Associate with five years of experience in project management. Skilled in conducting thorough market research and competitor analysis to assess market trends and client needs, and to develop appropriate acquisition tactics.”

Mention Skills in Your Cover Letter

Include these critical thinking skills in your cover letter. In the body of your letter, mention one or two of these skills, and give specific examples of times when you have demonstrated them at work. Think about times when you had to analyze or evaluate materials to solve a problem.

Show the Interviewer Your Skills

You can use these skill words in an interview. Discuss a time when you were faced with a particular problem or challenge at work and explain how you applied critical thinking to solve it.

Some interviewers will give you a hypothetical scenario or problem, and ask you to use critical thinking skills to solve it. In this case, explain your thought process thoroughly to the interviewer. He or she is typically more focused on how you arrive at your solution rather than the solution itself. The interviewer wants to see you analyze and evaluate (key parts of critical thinking) the given scenario or problem.

Of course, each job will require different skills and experiences, so make sure you read the job description carefully and focus on the skills listed by the employer.

Top Critical Thinking Skills

Keep these in-demand skills in mind as you refine your critical thinking practice —whether for work or school.

Part of critical thinking is the ability to carefully examine something, whether it is a problem, a set of data, or a text. People with analytical skills can examine information, understand what it means, and properly explain to others the implications of that information.

• Asking Thoughtful Questions
• Data Analysis
• Interpretation
• Questioning Evidence
• Recognizing Patterns

Communication

Often, you will need to share your conclusions with your employers or with a group of classmates or colleagues. You need to be able to communicate with others to share your ideas effectively. You might also need to engage in critical thinking in a group. In this case, you will need to work with others and communicate effectively to figure out solutions to complex problems.

• Active Listening
• Collaboration
• Explanation
• Interpersonal
• Presentation
• Verbal Communication
• Written Communication

Critical thinking often involves creativity and innovation. You might need to spot patterns in the information you are looking at or come up with a solution that no one else has thought of before. All of this involves a creative eye that can take a different approach from all other approaches.

• Flexibility
• Conceptualization
• Imagination
• Drawing Connections
• Synthesizing

Open-Mindedness

To think critically, you need to be able to put aside any assumptions or judgments and merely analyze the information you receive. You need to be objective, evaluating ideas without bias.

• Objectivity
• Observation

Problem-Solving

Problem-solving is another critical thinking skill that involves analyzing a problem, generating and implementing a solution, and assessing the success of the plan. Employers don’t simply want employees who can think about information critically. They also need to be able to come up with practical solutions.

• Attention to Detail
• Clarification
• Decision Making
• Groundedness
• Identifying Patterns

More Critical Thinking Skills

• Inductive Reasoning
• Deductive Reasoning
• Noticing Outliers
• Adaptability
• Emotional Intelligence
• Brainstorming
• Optimization
• Restructuring
• Integration
• Strategic Planning
• Project Management
• Ongoing Improvement
• Causal Relationships
• Case Analysis
• Diagnostics
• SWOT Analysis
• Business Intelligence
• Quantitative Data Management
• Qualitative Data Management
• Risk Management
• Scientific Method
• Consumer Behavior

Key Takeaways

• Demonstrate you have critical thinking skills by adding relevant keywords to your resume.
• Mention pertinent critical thinking skills in your cover letter, too, and include an example of a time when you demonstrated them at work.
• Finally, highlight critical thinking skills during your interview. For instance, you might discuss a time when you were faced with a challenge at work and explain how you applied critical thinking skills to solve it.

University of Louisville. " What is Critical Thinking ."

American Management Association. " AMA Critical Skills Survey: Workers Need Higher Level Skills to Succeed in the 21st Century ."

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Our Concept and Definition of Critical Thinking

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• What is Critical Thinking?

The ability to think critically calls for a higher-order thinking than simply the ability to recall information.

Definitions of critical thinking, its elements, and its associated activities fill the educational literature of the past forty years. Critical thinking has been described as an ability to question; to acknowledge and test previously held assumptions; to recognize ambiguity; to examine, interpret, evaluate, reason, and reflect; to make informed judgments and decisions; and to clarify, articulate, and justify positions (Hullfish & Smith, 1961; Ennis, 1962; Ruggiero, 1975; Scriven, 1976; Hallet, 1984; Kitchener, 1986; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991; Mines et al., 1990; Halpern, 1996; Paul & Elder, 2001; Petress, 2004; Holyoak & Morrison, 2005; among others).

After a careful review of the mountainous body of literature defining critical thinking and its elements, UofL has chosen to adopt the language of Michael Scriven and Richard Paul (2003) as a comprehensive, concise operating definition:

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.

Paul and Scriven go on to suggest that critical thinking is based on: "universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness. It entails the examination of those structures or elements of thought implicit in all reasoning: purpose, problem, or question-at-issue, assumptions, concepts, empirical grounding; reasoning leading to conclusions, implication and consequences, objections from alternative viewpoints, and frame of reference. Critical thinking - in being responsive to variable subject matter, issues, and purposes - is incorporated in a family of interwoven modes of thinking, among them: scientific thinking, mathematical thinking, historical thinking, anthropological thinking, economic thinking, moral thinking, and philosophical thinking."

This conceptualization of critical thinking has been refined and developed further by Richard Paul and Linder Elder into the Paul-Elder framework of critical thinking. Currently, this approach is one of the most widely published and cited frameworks in the critical thinking literature. According to the Paul-Elder framework, critical thinking is the:

• Analysis of thinking by focusing on the parts or structures of thinking ("the Elements of Thought")
• Evaluation of thinking by focusing on the quality ("the Universal Intellectual Standards")
• Improvement of thinking by using what you have learned ("the Intellectual Traits")

Selection of a Critical Thinking Framework

The University of Louisville chose the Paul-Elder model of Critical Thinking as the approach to guide our efforts in developing and enhancing our critical thinking curriculum. The Paul-Elder framework was selected based on criteria adapted from the characteristics of a good model of critical thinking developed at Surry Community College. The Paul-Elder critical thinking framework is comprehensive, uses discipline-neutral terminology, is applicable to all disciplines, defines specific cognitive skills including metacognition, and offers high quality resources.

Why the selection of a single critical thinking framework?

The use of a single critical thinking framework is an important aspect of institution-wide critical thinking initiatives (Paul and Nosich, 1993; Paul, 2004). According to this view, critical thinking instruction should not be relegated to one or two disciplines or departments with discipline specific language and conceptualizations. Rather, critical thinking instruction should be explicitly infused in all courses so that critical thinking skills can be developed and reinforced in student learning across the curriculum. The use of a common approach with a common language allows for a central organizer and for the development of critical thinking skill sets in all courses.

• SACS & QEP
• Planning and Implementation
• Why Focus on Critical Thinking?
• Paul-Elder Critical Thinking Framework
• Culminating Undergraduate Experience
• Community Engagement
• Frequently Asked Questions
• What is i2a?

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