Five Tips to Improve Your Critical Thinking
Samantha Agoos · 2016
"Critical thinking is a trainable skill built from five concrete habits — identifying a claim's origin, questioning your own information sources, spotting fallacies, considering other viewpoints, and evaluating your own reasoning process — not an innate trait some people simply have."
Critical thinking isn't a personality type. It's five specific habits you can practice like any other skill.
Agoos's TED-Ed lesson breaks it down into: formulate your question clearly before answering it, gather your information from multiple and reliable sources, apply the information by asking what's assumed versus what's actually shown, consider the implications of your conclusion, and explore other points of view before settling. The lesson's throughline is that most bad reasoning isn't a failure of intelligence — it's skipping one of these steps under time pressure.
Per this framework, what is the most common reason people reason badly, according to the lesson's own framing?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- 5 tips to improve your critical thinking (Samantha Agoos)Samantha Agoos / TED-Ed
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"Anchor to what usually happens before adjusting for what makes this case special."