What Critical Thinking Really Is

Critical thinking is not about being negative or winning arguments. It is a set of habits for checking whether what you read, hear and believe actually holds up, and it is one of the skills universities and employers value most.

A working definition

• Richard Paul and Linda Elder of the Foundation for Critical Thinking define it as "the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it". Notice that this includes your own thinking, not just other people's.
• Abertay University describes critical thinking at university as the objective evaluation of information or ideas, and notes that you already make critical evaluations instinctively, and even change your mind in light of new, convincing evidence.
• Being critical does not mean rejecting everything. It means asking how good the reasons are before you accept, reject or stay undecided.
• "I am not sure yet" is a perfectly good critical-thinking answer when the evidence is thin.

The core skills

• Texas Tech University lists the skills as: analysing complex problems, raising important questions, gathering and assessing information, recognising biases, considering several perspectives with an open mind, and solving problems thoughtfully and fairly.
• In everyday life this looks like pausing before forwarding a message, asking where a number came from, and checking whether the person making a claim gains from you believing it.
• It also means noticing your own feelings: a claim that makes you very angry or very pleased deserves a second look, because strong emotion makes all of us less careful.

Four questions to ask about any claim

• Who is saying it, and what qualifies them to say it?
• What exactly are they saying, and how are they saying it (calm explanation, or outrage and capital letters)?
• What evidence supports it, and do other informed people agree?
• Why are they saying it: to inform, to sell, to persuade, or to get clicks? These four questions are adapted from Abertay University's critical thinking guide, which also asks how the claim is said.

Description, analysis, judgement

• The Leeds model, used in Abertay's guide, sorts thinking into three groups of question.
• Description: Who? What? Where? When? This sets out the background and the facts.
• Analysis and evaluation: How? Why? What if? This looks at methods, causes and alternative explanations.
• Judgement: So what? What next? This decides how significant and reliable something is and what it means for you.
• A common mistake in school essays and university assignments is staying at description. Abertay notes that "description alone is not critical writing": aim to move up to analysis and judgement.

Why it matters for you now

• You will soon choose universities, courses, jobs, phone contracts, flats and investments, often based on adverts, rankings and online reviews.
• At university you will be marked on how well you weigh evidence, not just how much you know.
• Being clever is not enough on its own. A 2016 Stanford History Education Group study of 7,804 students, from middle school to university, found that students were easily fooled online, and a 2017 follow-up found that even PhD historians were often misled by professional-looking websites (Stanford News).
• Online, you meet claims from strangers, influencers, brands and automated accounts every day. Good habits protect your money, your reputation and your friends.