Chapter 1
Active Learning Questions
1.1 Explain the relevance of critical thinking skills to consuming information on the Internet.
1.2 Why is critical thinking highly valued by top corporations in the United States seeking employees?
1.3 How is critical thinking different than merely thinking about your own thinking or making a judgment?
1.4 Describe internet use around the world. How do you think amount of information available on the internet is related to challenges to critical thinking?
1.5 Discuss Flat Earth believers. What do you think is wrong with their thinking?
Active Learning Exercises
1.6 Identify an example of a conspiracy theory that is popular today (about politics, vaccines, etc.). How are beliefs in conspiracy theories most often not based on critical thinking? How are they related to misinformation? How can they be dangerous? Try to identify specific examples.
1.7 Talk to two friends of family members about a controversial topic that would be known to them, such as the decision by England to leave the European Union, or to require that all automobile manufacturers develop electric models by a certain date. How do you think critical thinking and the need for critical thinking instruction relates to the topic you selected? Do your friends or family provide examples of confirmation bias?
1.8 Here is an exercise for those of you who live in the United States or are familiar enough with recent events in the United States: Talk to two friends or family members, one who is a Republican and one who is a Democrat, about the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. How do you think critical thinking and the need for critical thinking instruction relates to what happened on January 6th, 2021? How do you think critical thinking, and the confirmation bias, relate to descriptions and explanations of the January 6 event by your friends or family members?
For readers from other countries, you may select a similar controversy from your part of the world. For example, readers from Turkey may want to try this using news about the firings and hirings on university campuses; those from Hong Kong may want to try this exercise using issues with free speech. Every country has its own controversies that might be suitable with this exercise. (If you are a student, please check with your instructor before selecting a topic.)
1.9 There are many topics that are hotly debated. Select one that is important to you (e.g., gun-related issues, paid leave to care for a family member, the bail system, etc.) Ask several people whom you don’t know now very well (note: not friends or family) what they think about the topic. Carefully record their answers and consider each statement—Is the statement based on data (e.g., number of deaths from guns—either intentional or unintentional)? Is the statement an opinion without any reasoning behind it (e. g. , the death penalty is just wrong—no reason given)?Is the statement attributed to a reasonable authority on the topic? Can you see a pattern in the responses on either or both sides of the controversy?
Chapter 2
Active Learning Questions
2.1. What are the most important variables that affect whether someone accurately remembers something or not?
2.2. Describe how critical thinking and memory are linked to perceptions of risk.
2.3. Describe how information is stored in long-term memory. How can a person improve memory storage?
2.4. Explain implicit memory as best as you can.
Active Learning Exercises
2.5. Ask a friend about an experience you had with them in the last 12 months (e.g., attending a concert, watching a sporting event, graduating from high school). Each of you write down as much as you can remember about the experience, then read aloud your memories. Compare how similar and different your memories of the event are. Why do you think your memories are similar? Why do you think they are different?
2.6. Flip through a popular magazine, paying attention especially to the advertisements, but only spend a few seconds looking at each page. Then write down as many of the product names and descriptions of products as you can. How do the images used affect your memory? What are the qualities of the images and products that you remember best? What are the qualities of the images and products that you remember least? What would you recommend to a company that is planning to put an advertisement in a magazine?
2.7. Try to remember the details of the last novel you read or the last movie you watched. Compare those memories to your memories of your favorite movie or your favorite book. What are some factors that might affect your memories of either? Why might you remember the details of your favorite book or movie better than the last one you read or watched?
2.8. Talk to a childhood friend about a shared memory from elementary school. How do their memories differ from yours? Why do you think your memories are different? Try to identify some reasons why your memories for the event are similar and different. How did time influence the memories?
Chapter 3
Active Learning Questions
3.1. Explain how language is a cognitive tool.
3.2. Explain the benefits of telling the truth for clear communication.
3.3. Explain Truth Default Theory and how it relates to political partisanship in the United States.
3.4. Explain how social trust and conformity may affect development of attitudes toward vaccinations for COVID-19.
3.5. Explain the importance of categorization for thought.
Active Learning Exercises
3.6. Ask a friend or classmate what specific communication behaviors they use when they are trying to communicate a complex idea clearly. Ask them to explain to you a complicated concept or idea they recently learned about in one of their classes. Compare their answers to the rules for clear communication in the chapter. How are their answers similar or different? Discuss with your friend how they might improve their descriptions and communicate more clearly.
3.7. Ask a friend, classmate, or family member to give their answers to the following list and then guess their answers. You might surprise them with your insight! When you are mostly correct in your guesses of their answers (see the chapter), explain how prototypes are predictable and important for how we think about the world.
- an animal
- a country
- a shape (a picture is okay)
- a holiday
- a greeting
- a villain
- a war
- an outdoor activity
- a movie star
- a boxer
3.8. Examine products in the supermarket that are labeled as “natural,” “organic,” “gluten-free,” “free-range,” and other labels. Compare their nutritional facts, ingredients, and prices to other products. What are the differences? What are the similarities?
Chapter 4
Active Learning Questions
4.1. Explain how responses to logical reasoning tasks can be fast.
4.2. Discuss the findings of Thompson et al. (2018) examining “high capacity reasoners.”
4.3. Explain what is meant by living in a “post-truth” era and why it is problematic.
4.4. Discuss Pinker’s concerns about rationality of thought in our society.
Active Learning Exercises
4.5. Ask a friend or family member what their understanding of logic is. Ask them if they know about conditional and categorical reasoning. If they don’t, try to explain each type of reasoning to them, including use of tree diagrams and circle diagrams. Teaching another person is a great way to learn a complicated topic. Report on your experience here.
4.6. Use circle diagrams to determine if the conclusion is valid:
Premise 1: Some COVID infections are prevented by wearing masks.
Premise 2: Some people do not wear masks.
Conclusion: Some people are not preventing the spread of COVID.
4.7. Discuss Figure 4.5 (The beliefs of Americans about evolution shown in circle diagrams) with 2-3 friends, classmates, or family members. Discuss the logic and rationality of each of the beliefs depicted in the graph. Try to be as logical as possible and as unemotional as possible. Speak in terms of what events are most likely according to observation of the natural world. Describe the discussion here.
Chapter 5
Active Learning Questions
5.1. Explain how “bots” are used, specifically in political campaigns.
5.2. Explain “deep fakes.”
5.3. Explain how “trolls” are used to spread disinformation online.
5.4. Explain how training can help stop the spread of disinformation online.
Active Learning Exercises
5.5. If you were an executive at YouTube or Facebook, what strategies or safeguards would you implement to stop the spread of disinformation? Be creative in your answers. Try to be as specific as possible.
5.6. Use the rubric provided under the “Credibility Crisis” in the chapter to analyze some disinformation or propaganda you found (or think you found) online. How is the rubric effective in helping you discern what is good information and what is not?
5.7. Find 4-5 Facebook posts (or posts on other social media like YouTube, Snap Chat, etc.) and analyze them for argument fallacies. How many of the 21 common fallacies can you identify?
5.8. Talk with a classmate or friend about their cherished beliefs (beliefs that are very important to them). Tell them about what it means to be “actively open-minded” (Baron, 2020). Ask them if they can think of any evidence that might affect their cherished beliefs. Could their minds ever be changed by these beliefs? Why or why not?
Chapter 6
Active Learning Questions
6.1. Explain the qualities of conspiracy theories. Try to apply these qualities to some popular conspiracy theories like Pizzagate, Qanon, and the Big Lie.
6.2. Explain how reliance on anecdotal evidence is linked to beliefs in the paranormal or supernatural.
6.3. Explain how belief in the paranormal is similar to and/or different from mainline religious beliefs.
6.4. Explain the Scientific Reasoning Scale (SRS) and how it might be useful in helping to combat disinformation.
Active Learning Exercises
6.5. Find a product that makes spectacular claims, but doesn’t provide much research evidence to support their claims (e.g., “detoxifying” foot pads, “miracle” hair growth products). Find as much information about the product as you can find online (please do not buy the product to evaluate it). What kinds of claims are made about the products? If you wanted to evaluate the products properly, how would you go about it?
6.6. Talk to a friend or family member about testimonial, anecdotal evidence. Try to provide them with several examples (e.g., commercials with a person exclaiming about a product, how word of mouth often affects buying behaviors). Ask them how much they value such evidence and why, and how they evaluate such evidence relative to how they evaluate systematic evidence gathered from large groups of people.
6.7. Find a research article in psychology using PsychInfo (a library database) or Google Scholar. Try to find an article that you are interested in (i.e., if you are interested in children’s learning, use “children” and “learning” as keywords in your search). Read the titles that come up and click on them to read the abstracts of the articles. Find an article that you find interesting and that is available for download (hopefully for free through your University Library). Once you have the article, read it and try to answer the following questions:
- What was the nature of the sample? Was it large enough? Was it biased? How so?
- Are the variables operationally defined? What do the terms mean?
- Were the measurements sensitive, valid, and reliable? Where the appropriate comparisons made to support the claims?
- Were extraneous variables controlled? What are other plausible explanations for the results?
- Do the conclusions follow from the observations?
- Are correlations being used to support causative arguments?
- Is disconfirming evidence being considered?
- Are the limitations of the research identified by the author(s)?
- How could the experimenter's expectancies be biasing the result?
Chapter 7
Active Learning Questions
7.1. How does the case of Lucia de Berk illustrate the importance of reasoning with probabilities?
7.2. Explain risk contagion and how it is linked to individual age.
7.3. Explain how our personal experiences may affect our ability to understand probability information.
7.4. Explain research examining overconfidence and expertise.
7.5. What is sports momentum and what does research indicate about whether it exists or not?
Active Learning Exercises
7.6. Think of previous experiences you have had personally in trying to reason probabilistically. Try to recall a situation where you tried to consider actual probabilities versus a situation where you used “fast and frugal” heuristics. Describe those situations. How did the situations differ from each other?
7.7. Ask several friends or family members to guess how likely it is that any two people in a regular classroom share the same birthday. Keep track of their answers. Try to explain to them why the likelihoods are higher than they expect. Explain what happened here.
7.8. Estimate the risk of death from the following activities, then seek out actual statistics on death rates from the same activities using publicly available information. How right or wrong were you for each of your estimates? Explain why you think you were possibly right about some (or all) and not about others.
- Being pregnant
- Serving in the military
- Water skiing
- Working on a deep sea fishing boat
- Being a high school teacher
- Being a high school student
- Speeding in a car more than 100 mph
- Being female and being married or in a relationship with a man
Chapter 8
Active Learning Questions
8.1. Explain how confirmation bias is linked with decisions about vaccinations.
8.2. Explain how ‘disfluency’ may affect bias in processing information.
8.3. Explain how people react to overconfident people who end up being wrong.
Active Learning Exercises
8.4. Look up information about infamous cult groups (e.g., The Peoples Temple, Heaven’s Gate, the NXIVM cult, the Way Down diet cult). How do you think groupthink operates within cults?
8.5. For readers from the United States, ask a friend or family member how confident they are that they can name all 50 U.S. states. Then ask them to name all 50 states. How did they do? Explain overconfidence and the Dunning-Krueger effect to your friend. How did they response? (You could also ask them how confident they are when it comes to naming all 50 state capitals. You may see their overconfidence correct itself somewhat if you ask them to name the 50 state birds or state flowers, for example.)
For readers from other parts of the world: There are many other similar activities you can devise. For example, ask how many countries are in Africa, then ask them to name as many countries as they can.
8.6. Talk with someone about how biased they think they are in decision making. Write down their response. Consider their response and how it relates to overconfidence and the Dunning-Krueger effect. Do you think this person would be responsive to training in critical thinking to improve decision making? Why or why not?
Chapter 9
Active Learning Questions
9.1. Explain how problem-based learning works and how effective it is.
9.2. Explain incubation in problem-solving. How does it work?
9.3. Explain the concept of grit and how it is linked to reaching one’s goals.
Active Learning Exercises
9.4. Map out a diagram of how you might reach a goal that you have (e.g., finishing the semester with high grades, getting a new job, transferring to another school, making a friendship with a person). Do you think the diagram will help you reach your goal? Why or why not?
9.5. Explain how a course in auto mechanics or cooking for a family might enhance learning using a real-life problem solving approach (problem-based learning). Think of several different scenarios that you might use to teach different lessons in such a course.
9.6. Interview a friend or family member about an important goal that they reached in their lives. Ask them about strategies they used, including planning, making diagrams, collaborations, and so on. Ask them how they feel their perseverance (their ‘grit’) influenced their progress, the time involved in reaching the goal, and their success.
Chapter 10
Active Learning Questions
10.1. How do definitions of creativity depend on identifying what is not creative?
10.2. Explain what is involved in links between sensitivity and creativity.
10.3. Explain how diversity in groups can help them to be more creative.
10.4. Explain how jokes are creative.
Active Learning Exercises
10.5. Draw a picture using colored pencils or pens or crayons or all of them. Actively attempt to be creative. Explain the methods you used to enhance your creativity. What else could you have done to increase creativity of your drawing? Ask a friend or family member how creative they think your drawing is. Explain what happened here.
10.6. Bake or cook a dish for your friends or your family. Actively attempt to be creative. Explain the methods you used to enhance your creativity. What else could you have done to increase creativity of your dish? What will you do differently next time you try to make this dish?
10.7. Explain how you might make a learning situation for children more creative. For example, teaching preschool kids about colors and color combinations, how could you enhance their creativity? How could you be more creative in teaching them?
Chapter 11
Active Learning Questions
11.1. Robert M. Sapolsky (2016) says: “Free yourself of the idea that humans are rational beings.” Explain what you think this means, based on your reading of the Thought & Knowledge textbook.
11.2. Explain what we can do to counter our own use of misinformation.
11.3. What are some differences between people who simply conform and go along and those who are take action to do the right thing, or to make a good argument?
11.4. Does telling someone about scientific evidence change their beliefs? What if they don’t know anything about a topic? What if they already have a strong opinion or belief about a topic?
Active Learning Exercises
11.5. Make a list of all the thinking skills you have developed or improved throughout your reading of this book (try not to look at the thinking skills listed at the end of each chapter as you do this). What do you think you still need to work on? How do you think you can continue to making progress in your own critical thinking skills?
11.6. Talk with a friend or family member about some of the world’s problems today (racism, sexism, ableism, violence, substance addiction, climate change, poverty). How do you think critical thinking instruction can help solve the world’s problems? Try to be creative and try to be as specific as possible in your answers.
11.7. Use the four steps offered by Kaplan (2019) to address misinformation about vaccines that you find online. Outline each step and what you did below. How did the four steps help you to resist the misinformation? Try to be as specific in your answers as you can be.