Critical thinking really can be taught, suggests a new study led by Michael Bishop, a professor of philosophy at Florida State University.
For the study, published earlier this year in the Journal of American Psychology, Bishop and his collaborators split 397 students into two groups. Students in one group took a critical thinking class while students in the second group did not. The students who took critical thinking saw significant advantages over the students who did not.
As Bishop and his co-authors note, “the results suggest that an appropriately designed critical thinking class can dramatically reduce four common biases in judgment and decision making: honoring sunk costs, inferring causation from correlation, ignoring regression to the mean, and overlooking opportunity costs.”
Bishop is currently working on a book about teaching critical thinking. He discusses some highlights from the study as well as his experiences teaching the topic to students.
Teaching Critical Thinking: Defining What Critical Thinking Is
Attempts to teach critical thinking frequently fail, Bishop says. He believes this is because most approaches don’t follow the proper steps to teaching the topic, the first of which is defining what it means for somebody to be a better critical thinker.
“A lot of people who try to teach critical thinking go wrong on this first step,” Bishop says. This is because Bishop believes common definitions of critical thinking often focus on the wrong things.
"One wrong answer is that a rational thinker uses good rules or rational methods," he says. "Or you might think a rational thinker is an expert debater." But he says these definitions of critical and rational thinking are incomplete. Instead, with students, he focuses on providing them with effective strategies for engaging more deeply and accurately with various topics.
“I think that, really, a rational thinker in the end, it's not somebody who wins a lot of debates or the person who's most well-informed about issues," Bishop says. "It’s somebody who asks helpful and fruitful questions. These are questions that tend to lead to better answers.”
Emphasizing that it's about learning the proper process, Bishop adds, “I’m not teaching them rules. I'm not trying to teach them to win debates. I want them to ask fruitful questions.”
Implementing Critical Thinking Lessons
Once you define what critical thinking looks like, you have to accurately assess why your students are not asking fruitful questions.
Bishop says that often students can ask fruitful questions in idealized situations yet fail to understand the implications of these strategies in real-world scenarios. For instance, Bishop has a scenario he asks students about in which they have to imagine their country is going to war with an unfriendly country. Students are told that ultimately, the war will be beneficial for their country with rewards outweighing costs.
Putting aside the non-financial costs of war for the sake of this argument, most students say that going to war is a good idea. However, in giving this answer, they’re making a potentially costly assumption that becomes clear if they think about the problem another way.
Instead of going to war, Bishop asks students to imagine they’re given three envelopes and told they can have the contents of one of the three envelopes. If they look in the first envelope and see a $5 bill, they can stop the game then, and they’d be $5 richer than they were before the game started. But since seeing the contents of the other envelopes before making their decision is permitted, students realize that taking the $5 is a bad choice because there could be much more money in the other envelopes.
Part of what Bishop tries to convey to students is that the envelope problem and the war scenario should be treated the same way. “When I argue that ‘Hey, we should go to war because it's going to bring us this benefit,' all of a sudden it's harder to see. It's harder to recognize.”
Critical Thinking in Different Contexts
The three-envelope and war example Bishop provides is a variant of the operational cost fallacy in which we tend to ignore the cost of pursuing alternative strategies — for instance, the benefits we miss out on by a course of action we could take instead of going to war. Each of these fallacies can take some time to understand and then implement in the real world.
This is part of why Bishop calls his strategies for overcoming these fallacies in real life "cheat codes.” Once students do the initial work to learn them, they tend to have more informed decision-making.
While this research focused on a handful of fallacies, Bishop says that teaching good critical thinking skills involves teaching additional fallacies and mistakes. For instance, another thing students should look for is confirmation bias. This occurs when people use good critical thinking when opposing ideas they disagree with, but throw all that out the window when examining their side of the argument.
This is so common that Bishop wrote a short ditty about it that serves as a quick and important critical thinking lesson all on its own. It goes: “Low standards for my views and high standards for yours/Make us bad thinkers, extremists, and bores.”
