Critical Thinking

Internal code: 2.2

Target groups: students

General description Reflect on information with concentration, logically and with knowledge (Daniel Kahneman's System 2 mode of thought) and not emotionally, instinctively, following rules of thumb (Daniel Kahneman's System 1).
 * Binckhorst Institute calls System 2's activities: "effortful mental activities"

Interventions
 * (Ecker, U. et al. (2022)) "... allowing people to deliberate can improve their judgements. If quick evaluation of a headline is followed by an opportunity to rethink, belief in fake news — but not factual news — is reduced Likewise, encouraging people to ‘think like fact checkers’ leads them to rely more on their own prior knowledge instead of heuristics."

Critical Thinking Impact Measurement

Assumptions - (Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Twitter) "In theory, being skeptic means exercising one's critical reasoning skills. In practice many are "skeptics" because they have no reasoning skills."
 * The assumption is that either System 2 is gullible or that we possess 'mechanisms of human vigilance' (Mercier, H. (2020)). In both cases 'effortful mental activities' are needed to compensate.
 * Disinformation relies on a wrong kind of critical thinking.
 * Klaas van Berkel: "Critical thinking often is confused with 'countering everything'. But critical thinking on the contrary means: test theories and arguments against research findings, not just claim anything." (Twitter, original in Dutch)
 * (Aaronovitch, D. (2010)) Attraction for conspiracy believers: “feeling of transcendence”. “Real scepticism is indeed tiring and in many ways unattractive. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” … It always means the same thing: it is the sceptic who has a closed mind, and the believer whose [sic] being open to the world. So the believer in a conspiracy theory or theories becomes, in his own mind, the one who understands the true ordering of things.”

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