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Critical Thinking and Effective Communication: Enhancing Interpersonal Skills for Success

In today’s fast-paced world, effective communication and critical thinking have become increasingly important skills for both personal and professional success. Critical thinking refers to the ability to analyze situations, gather information, and make sound judgments, while effective communication involves not only conveying ideas clearly but also actively listening and responding to others. These two crucial abilities are intertwined, as critical thinking often mediates information processing, leading to a more comprehensive understanding and ultimately enhancing communication.

The importance of critical thinking and effective communication cannot be overstated, as they are essential in various aspects of life, including problem-solving, decision-making, and relationship-building. Additionally, these skills are indispensable in the workplace, as they contribute to overall productivity and foster a positive and collaborative environment. Developing and nurturing critical thinking and effective communication abilities can significantly improve both personal and professional experiences, leading to increased success in various realms of life.

Key Takeaways

• Critical thinking and effective communication are essential skills for personal and professional success.
• These abilities play a vital role in various aspects of life, including problem-solving, decision-making, and relationship-building.
• Developing and honing critical thinking and communication skills can lead to increased productivity and a more positive, collaborative environment.

Critical Thinking Fundamentals

Skill and knowledge.

Critical thinking is an essential cognitive skill that individuals should cultivate in order to master effective communication. It is the ability to think clearly and rationally, understand the logical connections between ideas, identify and construct arguments, and evaluate information to make better decisions in personal and professional life [1] . A well-developed foundation of knowledge is crucial for critical thinkers, as it enables them to analyze situations, evaluate arguments, and draw, inferences from the information they process.

Analysis and Evidence

A key component of critical thinking is the ability to analyze information, which involves breaking down complex problems or arguments into manageable parts to understand their underlying structure [2] . Analyzing evidence is essential in order to ascertain the validity and credibility of the information, which leads to better decision-making. Critical thinkers must consider factors like the source’s credibility, the existence of potential biases, and any relevant areas of expertise before forming judgments.

Clarity of Thought

Clarity of thought is an integral element of critical thinking and effective communication. Being able to articulate ideas clearly and concisely is crucial for efficient communication [3] . Critical thinkers are skilled at organizing their thoughts and communicating them in a structured manner, which is vital for ensuring the transmission of accurate and relevant information.

In summary, mastering critical thinking fundamentals, including skill and knowledge, analysis of evidence, and clarity of thought, is essential for effective communication. Cultivating these abilities will enable individuals to better navigate their personal and professional lives, fostering stronger, more efficient connections with others.

Importance of Critical Thinking

Workplace and leadership.

Critical thinking is a vital skill for individuals in the workplace, particularly for those in leadership roles. It contributes to effective communication, enabling individuals to articulate their thoughts clearly and understand the perspectives of others. Furthermore, critical thinking allows leaders to make informed decisions by evaluating available information and considering potential consequences. Developing this skill can also empower team members to solve complex problems by exploring alternative solutions and applying rational thinking.

Decisions and Problem-Solving

In both personal and professional contexts, decision-making and problem-solving are crucial aspects of daily life. Critical thinking enables individuals to analyze situations, identify possible options, and weigh the pros and cons of each choice. By employing critical thinking skills, individuals can arrive at well-informed decisions that lead to better outcomes. Moreover, applying these skills can help to identify the root cause of a problem and devise innovative solutions, thereby contributing to overall success and growth.

Confidence and Emotions

Critical thinking plays a significant role in managing one’s emotions and cultivating self-confidence. By engaging in rational and objective thinking, individuals can develop a clearer understanding of their own beliefs and values. This awareness can lead to increased self-assurance and the ability to effectively articulate one’s thoughts and opinions. Additionally, critical thinking can help individuals navigate emotionally-charged situations by promoting logical analysis and appropriate emotional responses. Ultimately, honing critical thinking skills can establish a strong foundation for effective communication and emotional intelligence.

Effective Communication

Effective communication is essential in building strong relationships and achieving desired outcomes. It involves the exchange of thoughts, opinions, and information so that the intended message is received and understood with clarity and purpose. This section will focus on three key aspects of effective communication: Verbal Communication, Nonverbal Communication, and Visual Communication.

Verbal Communication

Verbal communication is the use of spoken or written words to convey messages. It is vital to choose the right words, tone, and structure when engaging in verbal communication. Some elements to consider for effective verbal communication include:

• Being clear and concise: Focus on the main points and avoid unnecessary information.
• Active listening: Give full attention to the speaker and ask questions for clarification.
• Appropriate language: Use language that is easily understood by the audience.
• Emotional intelligence: Understand and manage emotions during communication.

Nonverbal Communication

Nonverbal communication involves gestures, body language, facial expressions, and other visual cues that complement verbal messages. It plays a crucial role in conveying emotions and intentions, and can often have a significant impact on the effectiveness of communication. Some key aspects of nonverbal communication are:

• Eye contact: Maintaining eye contact shows that you are attentive and engaged.
• Posture: Good posture indicates confidence and credibility.
• Gestures and facial expressions: Use appropriate gestures and facial expressions to support your message.
• Proximity: Maintain a comfortable distance from your audience to establish rapport.

Visual Communication

Visual communication involves the use of visual aids such as images, graphs, charts, and diagrams to support or enhance verbal messages. It can help to make complex information more understandable and engaging. To maximize the effectiveness of visual communication, consider the following tips:

• Relevance: Ensure that the visual aids are relevant to the message and audience.
• Simplicity: Keep the design and content simple for easy comprehension.
• Consistency: Use a consistent style, format, and color scheme throughout the presentation.
• Accessibility: Make sure that the visual aids are visible and clear to all audience members.

In conclusion, understanding and implementing verbal, nonverbal, and visual communication skills are essential for effective communication. By combining these elements, individuals can establish strong connections, and successfully relay their messages to others.

Critical Thinking Skills in Communication

Listening and analyzing.

Developing strong listening and analyzing skills is crucial for critical thinking in communication. This involves actively paying attention to what others are saying and sifting through the information to identify key points. Taking a step back to analyze and evaluate messages helps ensure a clear understanding of the topic.

By improving your listening and analyzing abilities, you become more aware of how people communicate their thoughts and ideas. Active listening helps you dig deeper and discover the underlying connections between concepts. This skill enhances your ability to grasp the core meaning and identify any ambiguities or inconsistencies.

Biases and Perspective

Recognizing biases and considering different perspectives are essential components of critical thinking in communication. Everyone has preconceived notions and beliefs that can influence their understanding of information. By being aware of your biases and actively questioning them, you can strengthen your ability to communicate more effectively.

Considering other people’s perspectives allows you to view an issue from multiple angles, eventually leading to a more thorough understanding. Approaching communications with an open and receptive mind gives you a greater ability to relate and empathize with others, which in turn enhances the overall effectiveness of communication.

Problem-Solving and Questions

Critical thinking is intrinsically linked to problem-solving and asking questions. By incorporating these skills into the communication process, you become more adept at identifying issues, formulating solutions, and adapting the way you communicate to different situations.

Asking well-crafted questions helps you uncover valuable insights and points of view that may be hidden or not immediately apparent. Inquiring minds foster a more dynamic and interactive communication; promoting continuous learning, growth, and development.

Ultimately, enhancing your critical thinking skills in communication leads to better understanding, stronger connections, and more effective communication. By combining active listening, awareness of biases and perspectives, and problem-solving through questioning, you can significantly improve your ability to navigate even the most complex communications with confidence and clarity.

Improving Critical Thinking and Communication

Methods and techniques.

One approach to improve critical thinking and communication is by incorporating various methods and techniques into your daily practice. Some of these methods include:

• Asking open-ended questions
• Analyzing information from multiple perspectives
• Employing logical reasoning

By honing these skills, individuals can better navigate the complexities of modern life and develop more effective communication capabilities.

Problem-Solving Skills

Developing problem-solving skills is also essential for enhancing critical thinking and communication. This involves adopting a systematic framework that helps in identifying, analyzing, and addressing problems. A typical problem-solving framework includes:

• Identifying the problem
• Gathering relevant information
• Evaluating possible solutions
• Choosing the best solution
• Implementing the chosen solution
• Assessing the outcome and adjusting accordingly

By mastering this framework, individuals can tackle problems more effectively and communicate their solutions with clarity and confidence.

Staying on Point and Focused

Staying on point and focused is a critical aspect of effective communication. To ensure that your message is concise and clear, it is crucial to:

• Determine the main purpose of your communication
• Consider the needs and expectations of your audience
• Use precise language to convey your thoughts

By maintaining focus throughout your communication, you can improve your ability to think critically and communicate more effectively.

In summary, enhancing one’s critical thinking and communication skills involves adopting various techniques, honing problem-solving skills, and staying focused during communication. By incorporating these practices into daily life, individuals can become more confident, knowledgeable, and capable communicators.

Teaching and Training Critical Thinking

Content and curriculum.

Implementing critical thinking in educational settings requires a well-designed curriculum that challenges learners to think deeply on various topics. To foster critical thinking, the content should comprise of complex problems, real-life situations, and thought-provoking questions. By using this type of content , educators can enable students to analyze, evaluate, and create their own understandings, ultimately improving their ability to communicate effectively.

Instructors and Teachers

The role of instructors and teachers in promoting critical thinking cannot be underestimated. They should be trained and equipped with strategies to stimulate thinking, provoke curiosity, and encourage students to question assumptions. Additionally, they must create a learning environment that supports the development of critical thinking by being patient, open-minded, and accepting of diverse perspectives.

Engaging Conversations

Conversations play a significant role in the development of critical thinking and effective communication skills. Instructors should facilitate engaging discussions, prompt students to explain their reasoning, and ask open-ended questions that promote deeper analysis. By doing so, learners will be able to refine their ideas, understand various viewpoints, and build their argumentation skills, leading to more effective communication overall.

Critical thinking and effective communication are two interrelated skills that significantly contribute to personal and professional success. Through the application of critical thinking , individuals can create well-structured, clear, and impactful messages.

• Clarity of Thought : Critical thinking helps in organizing thoughts logically and coherently. When engaging in communication, this clarity provides a strong foundation for conveying ideas and opinions.
• Active Listening : A crucial aspect of effective communication involves actively listening to the messages from others. This allows for better understanding and consideration of multiple perspectives, strengthening the critical thinking process.
• Concise and Precise Language : Utilizing appropriate language and avoiding unnecessary jargon ensures that the message is easily understood by the target audience.

Individuals who excel in both critical thinking and communication are better equipped to navigate complex situations and collaborate with others to achieve common goals. By continuously honing these skills, one can improve their decision-making abilities and enhance their relationships, both personally and professionally. In a world where effective communication is paramount, mastering critical thinking is essential to ensuring one’s thoughts and ideas are received and understood by others.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the essential aspects of critical thinking.

Critical thinking involves the ability to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information in order to make sound decisions and solve problems. Essential aspects of critical thinking include asking better questions , identifying and challenging assumptions, understanding different perspectives, and recognizing biases.

How do communication skills impact problem-solving?

Effective communication skills are crucial in problem-solving, as they facilitate the exchange of information, ideas, and perspectives. Clear and concise communication helps ensure that all team members understand the problem, the proposed solutions, and their roles in the process. Additionally, strong listening skills enable better comprehension of others’ viewpoints and foster collaboration.

How does language influence critical thinking?

Language plays a key role in critical thinking, as it shapes the way we interpret and express information. The choice of words, phrases, and structures can either clarify or obscure meaning. A well-structured communication promotes a better understanding of complex ideas, making it easier for individuals to think critically and apply the concepts to problem-solving.

What strategies can enhance communication in critical thinking?

To enhance communication during critical thinking, individuals should be clear and concise in expressing their thoughts, listen actively to others’ perspectives, and use critical thinking skills to analyze and evaluate the information provided. Encouraging open dialogue, asking probing questions, and being receptive to feedback can also foster a conducive environment for critical thinking.

What are the benefits of critical thinking in communication?

Critical thinking enhances communication by promoting clarity, objectivity, and logical reasoning. When we engage in critical thinking, we question assumptions, consider multiple viewpoints, and evaluate the strength of arguments. As a result, our communication becomes more thoughtful, persuasive, and effective at conveying the intended message .

How do critical thinking skills contribute to effective communication?

Critical thinking skills contribute to effective communication by ensuring that individuals are able to analyze, comprehend, and interpret the information being shared. This allows for more nuanced understanding of complex ideas and helps to present arguments logically and coherently. Additionally, critical thinking skills can aid in identifying any underlying biases or assumptions in the communicated information, thus enhancing overall clarity and effectiveness.

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7.2 Critical Thinking

Imagine someone asked you to share the best way to approach a colleague about a behaviour that is bothering them. What would you say? How did you come to your response? If you asked and someone told you their answer, what would you think or feel about their response? How did you come to the reaction you had to their response? Recalling the role of perception from an earlier chapter, we know that our communication is always shaped by a perspective we hold based on our experiences. What happens when you don’t know the answer or you don’t like the option someone else provided? How do you re-approach the question to come up with a response? When searching for information on how to answer a question, how do we select the best information? Communication competence is achieved by the ability to pay critical attention to how information is being perceived, selected, and communicated by ourselves and others. This is especially challenging in increasingly diverse, complex, and information-filled environments.

So, what are our strategies? In reality, there are many different strategies to critically attend to the messages we send and receive. In this section, we will explore a three-strategy approach: critical listening , critical thinking , and critical ignoring .

In the scenario above in which a co-worker asks you to share the best way to approach a colleague about a behaviour that is bothering them, what would your immediate response be? Your immediate response might be an effective solution, but that’s not what we’re trying to figure out. Whatever your immediate response was, we want to learn to employ strategies to actively seek other possible solutions and explore them in depth. Your immediate response to the question may also indicate your own bias, which is what we want to avoid when choosing and communicating a response. Bias is “an outlook … based on a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgement and/or an instance of such prejudice” (Merriam-Webster, 2023a). Perhaps you consciously recall personal experiences of how you’ve approached co-workers in the past, and your immediate response has been shaped by those experiences. Your response is biased because it is based on personal experience. Sometimes we are consciously aware of our bias when we communicate; however, implicit bias can also exist. Implicit bias is “a bias or prejudice that is present but not consciously held or recognized” (Merriam-Webster, 2023b). Shaping our response according to our experiences is natural and helps us make decisions quickly. At the same time, relying only on our own experiences limits us to the options we already know.

If competent communication is our goal, competent communicators can understand, choose from, and perform a wide range of behaviours (Adler et al., 2021, pp. 16–19). Knowing about conscious and implicit bias, we can start to listen to ourselves and others communicate and possibly become consciously aware. Listening to all communication can help us become more reasoned communicators and allow us to connect better with others as we acknowledge diverse perspectives alongside our own. Bias can turn into reason when more information is gathered, other possible solutions are identified, and all the information is analyzed to determine a reasoned response or action.

Ultimately, using strategies to critically attend to information helps us to do the following:

• Challenge our assumptions
• Avoid information overload
• Avoid the communication of biased or irrelevant information
• Develop an understanding of and empathy for different perspectives
• Explore options to make an informed decision
• Connect with diverse audiences.

Strategy 1: Critical Listening

Many different ways of listening are described in literature. Three listening types are commonly discussed:

• Informational listening
• Comprehensive and evaluative listening
• Empathic listening

Each type of listening serves a different purpose, can be used in isolation or simultaneously, and can help us perceive, select and/or evaluate information to use orally or in writing. Each of the listening styles can be used when attending to external information being given to us and can also serve as an introspective approach to listening to ourselves.

Informational listening involves gathering new information and facts, then identifying key points. This is followed by recording the information so that we can access it later by committing it to memory and/or taking physical notes.

Comprehensive and evaluative listening is a combination of listening styles that does not attempt to decide if information is right or wrong. Instead, this listening style determines the main message the information is trying to send and how similar or different the information is to our existing knowledge and beliefs. It is through this listening style that we decide what we have learned. This process is an active approach that uses the following steps;

• Seeks to understand and organize the information gathered; uses paraphrasing and questioning communication skills
• Seeks to align the new information with what we already know or believe

Empathic listening is an active listening style that seeks to identify and understand the feelings and emotions behind the information being presented. You may ask questions, gently requesting that the speaker discuss their feelings and emotions. You will also use paraphrasing, and seek clarification to help understand whether you have truly heard the other person’s perspective. This listening style helps to create connection and trust between the listener and speaker.

Consider the following scenario: Your workplace team is trying to decide whether cellphones should be banned whenever interactions with clients take place. The discussion has been raised several times and there are many different opinions and perspectives on the question.

When you ask yourself the question, listen to your own reaction and internal communication. When you imagine this discussion taking place with your workplace team, imagine the range of opinions and perspectives. When you imagine yourself doing any kind of research to gather information about the topic, imagine the information you might find.

How would you use each of the listening styles above? Imagine the possible information you might gather from each listening style. Imagine the possible emotions and feelings that may need to be managed. What might be the benefits and challenges from using each listening style?

Gathering information is usually the first step in any situation that requires critically attending to information, but it doesn’t end there, and you may revisit the critical listening strategy at any point in your approach. Nonetheless, after gathering information, you’ll need to do something with it, and there may be a lot of information to sort through. This is where the next two strategies come into play.

Strategy 2: Critical Thinking

The concept of critical thinking does not have a single definition; instead, definitions range from simple to complex but capture a common theme of analyzing information to gain a better understanding.

Here are a few definitions to consider:

• Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action (Foundation for Critical Thinking, 2019).
• For some, critical thinking has a lot to do with understanding one’s own perspective and those of others.
• Critical thinking is the mental process involved in processing information for the purpose of problem solving, decision making, and thinking critically (Drew, 2023).
• Critical thinking is the means of assessing the accuracy, authenticity, plausibility, or sufficiency of all information (Beyer 1995).
• Critical thinking is developing the ability to think in alignment with the original idea or different from the original idea.

Not surprisingly, several critical-thinking models or frameworks are commonly used. Each approaches the process of analyzing and understanding information in a different way and for a different purpose. Some examples of critical-thinking models are listed in the table below.

Table 7.1. Examples of Critical-Thinking Models or Frameworks

Consider the previous scenario where your workplace team is trying to decide whether cellphones should be banned whenever interactions with clients take place. The discussion has been raised several times, and there are many different opinions and perspectives on the question. Choose one or two of the critical-thinking models in the table above to explore and click on the links. Use the steps in each model to answer the question “Should cellphones be banned whenever interactions with clients take place?”

In their own unique way, each model will ask you to gather more information from sources of information such as books, articles, or other people. You will then compare and analyze the information and perspectives you gather, considering possible courses of action and their possible outcomes and impacts. This gathering, sorting, and analyzing of information is essential to making a final decision based on reason instead of personal bias. However, as you may have already felt, the process can be overwhelming if there are a lot of facts, perspectives, and resulting options and consequences. We can understand why personal bias becomes the more attractive and easily accessible option.

Strategy 3: Critical Ignoring

The third and find strategy in moving towards communication competence, critical ignoring , helps us navigate the sea of information and decide what to keep and what to discard. As you consider your own response and that of others to the question “Should cellphones be banned whenever interactions with clients take place?” you may think of some strong opinionated responses that might be communicated or find some compelling evidence for or against the issue when you research the topic. The degree to which you feel overwhelmed by the information indicates your natural capacity for taking in information, and you may have already started to ignore some of the information you have come across.

This means you are already engaging in critical ignoring , which is choosing what to ignore, learning how to resist misleading information, and deciding where to invest your attention (Kozyreva et al., 2023). You may now be asking how critical ignoring is not biased. Critical ignoring is not biased because the choice of what information is ignored is based on assessing the quality of the information and is not based on personal opinions and perspectives. Note that although critical ignoring is designed for online sources of information, it is possible to apply the same approach to human sources of information.

The following three steps are involved in critical ignoring:

• Self-nudging: This is ignoring temptations by removing them. For example, you know that a particular website or social media platform tends to post a lot of information that grabs your attention but isn’t usually helpful because of its lack of objective facts and supporting evidence. You turn off notifications from these sources or remove them. Then you turn your attention to the high-quality sources of information that usually do provide information that stands up to reason. Self-nudging provides a sense of control, enabling you to access the best sources of information in diverse and complex environments.
• Lateral reading: This is determining how trustworthy a source and its information is by investigating the background of the website and author, and by comparing the information across a wide variety of sources. For example, you click on an article with an attention-grabbing title that is connected to a problem you’ve recently been discussing with colleagues. The information sounds excellent and helpful, but how to be sure? Investigating the author of the article reveals that they have credentials and experience related to the topic. A close look at the organization that runs the website reveals that they are selling one of the products mentioned in the article, which casts doubt on the quality of the information. Last but not least, you search for other articles on the same topic, and almost all the articles from different sources agree with the information presented in the original article. You assess the article’s information to be of reasonable quality and forward it to your colleagues to consider. Lateral reading is initially time consuming, but with practice, it can develop into a quick and easy method of investing in the highest-quality information.
• Do not feed the trolls—ignoring malicious actors: This involves learning how to ignore the people who spread misinformation or harass others using multiple platforms, or those who create debate or argument where there is none to be had. Because online statements can be emotionally charged, deliberately personal, or polarizing, we as humans tend to have just as emotional a response, and it is difficult not to react or try to defend the cause or individual being attacked. “Feeding the trolls” by directly engaging with them is tempting but ultimately has the same effect as feeding ourselves a good breakfast—it provides the necessary fuel for growth and regeneration. Instead of feeding the trolls, do not respond directly, block and report them to the platform where they are making statements, and then seek support from your close social group or professionals.

(Kozyreva et al., 2023)

Consider the previous scenario where your workplace team is trying to decide whether cellphones should be banned whenever interactions with clients take place. If you followed the first two steps, critical listening and critical thinking , you now have a lot of information to sort through. There may be many different opinions and perspectives on the question, and perhaps you found a few published articles. Next comes the third and final step, critical ignoring , to narrow down the information that really helps to answer the question.

As you reflect on the information you gather when exploring any topic or question, this three-strategy approach will help you manage the information and come to a reasonable course of action.

Relating Theory to Real Life

• Consider the following questions (Stevenson, 2023) and choose one that you would like to use to work through the three-step critical-thinking strategy you’ve read about on this page:
• Does humanity have the right to colonize other planets?
• Should we aim to rehabilitate prisoners or should we just punish them for their crimes?
• Would public health care be better than private?
• Should more be done to protect children on social media?

2. Use the critical listening, critical thinking, and critical ignoring three-step strategy.

• What response to the original question did you come up with?
• List and describe at least three key points that helped determine your final response as a result of using the three-step strategy.

Attribution

Unless otherwise indicated, material on this page has been copied and adapted from the following resource:

Department of Communication Studies. (n.d.). Communicating to connect: Interpersonal communication for today. Austin Community College. https://sites.google.com/austincc.edu/interpersonaloer/title-page , licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 , except where otherwise noted.

Adler, R. B., Rolls, J. A., & Proctor, R., II. (2021). LOOK: Looking out, looking in (4th ed.). Cengage Canada. (Original work published 2017)

Apedaile, S., & NorQuest College Centre for Intercultural Education. (2015). The Something’s up! cycle . https://www.norquest.ca/NorquestCollege/media/pdf/about/resources/intercultural-resources-for-educators/the-somethings-up-cycle.pdf

Beyer, B. K. (1995).  Critical thinking. Phi Kappa Delta Educational Foundation.

Crockett, L. (2021, September 29). The most useful critical thinking mental models to know about . Future Focused Learning. https://blog.futurefocusedlearning.net/useful-critical-thinking-mental-models

Drew, C. (2023, May 10). The 4 types of critical thinking skills – explained! HelpfulProfessor.com. https://helpfulprofessor.com/thinking-skills/

The Foundation for Critical Thinking. (2019). Defining critical thinking . https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766

Hammond, J., Keeney, R., & Raiffa, H. (1999). Smart choices: PROACT technique . Harvard Business School Press. https://www.canada.ca/en/services/jobs/training/initiatives/skills-success/tools/problem-solved-employees-learners.html#h2.04

Kozyreva, A., Wineburg, S., Lewandowsky, S., & Hertwig, R. (2023). Critical ignoring as a core competence for digital citizens. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 32 (1), 81–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214221121570

Merriam-Webster. (2023a). Bias. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary . https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bias

Merriam-Webster. (2023b). Implicit bias. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary . https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/implicit%20bias

Plymouth University. (2010). Critical thinking . Learning Development with Plymouth University. https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/uploads/production/document/path/1/1710/Critical_Thinking.pdf

Stevenson, T. (2023, April 13). 80 ethical questions to ask yourself and others . Questions About Everything. https://questionsabouteverything.com/ethical-questions/#Looking_For_More_Questions

Vanderpool, A., & Robinson, T. A. (2017, November 29). Critical thinking: Multiple models for teaching and learning (abridged) . Teaching With Writing: The WIC Newsletter (Spring 2023). https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/wicnews/2017/11/29/critical-thinking-multiple-models-teaching-learning/#:~:text=Beyer’s%20evaluative%20thinking%20model&text=Thus%2C%20critical%20(or%2C%20to,(Beyer%201995%2C%2010

Introduction to Communications Copyright © 2023 by NorQuest College is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Critical Thinking & Communication

Critical thinking and communication are closely related. If you aren’t able to think critically about problems, information, and obstacles as they relate to your relationships, the media you consume, and the conversations you have, you are set up to fail. If you can’t think critically, communication won’t be as good as it possibly can be. Good critical thinking directly influences the quality and nature of the messages you send, the conversations you have, the decisions you make, and the overall quality of your communication interactions.

Critical thinking helps communication improve. And good communication influences critical thinking.

“Critical Thinking” means getting beyond just the surface-level questions about a topic or subject during a conversation or discussion. Think of critical thinking as interrogating and investigating an idea, a current state, or potential solution on the merits of its rigor and its usefulness. If you can’t “think critically” well, you’re quite simply at a disadvantage when you communicate. There is a steamroller of disinformation out there, tricky people everywhere, and there are important decisions all over the place! Better critical thinking helps you to analyze problems more adeptly, helps to create better connections with people, and achieves more positive, productive outcomes.

Critical thinking is an active process. You have to make a willful, conscious decision to engage in it. It’s a skill that needs to be exercised and practiced. It doesn’t just happens automatically. You have to put your critical thinking hat on and leave it on, almost quite literally. It can protect and shield you from all the bad ideas that are out there.

So what does better critical thinking get us? So what?  

What Does Critical Thinking Get Us?

Critical thinking, done in good faith, results in better outputs (ideas, conversations, relationships). Critical thinking leads to better communication outcomes. This goes both for you individually, for pairs of people, and for collective groups. It’s our human gift to be able to more rigorously interrogate ideas, thoroughly vet outcomes, and collaborate with people to create better outcomes. More critical thinking simply cannot be bad.

Critical thinking isn’t required only about big, obvious problems either. Of course we should think critically collectively about the large problems that face us (Police Reform, for example). That’s obvious. Similarly, of course it’s in your interest to think critically about problems and challenges, say, at your job. But we’re constantly faced with an array of problems, large and small. These problems happen at large scales with problems that are beyond any one person and they are the more simple sorts of relational problems that can be solved between two people with just slightly more close, dedicated effort.

So, how can we think critically, better?

Critical Thinking Explained

Critical thinking is essentially a purposeful process of asking questions. We can start by thinking of questions in standard categories: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How. Some questions to ask yourself to stimulate critical thinking:

Who         … benefits from this?

                … is harmed?

                … makes the decision?

                … is directly affected? In what ways?

                … if anyone, would be a good person to consult?

What         … are the strengths/weaknesses?

                … is another perspective or good alternative?

                … would be a counter argument?

                … is most important/least important?

                … is blocking us?

                … can we do to make a positive change?

Where      … could we learn from others?

                … can we get more information?

                … to improve?

                … could we get help?

                … will this idea take us?

When       … will we know we’ve succeeded?

                … can we expect to see change?

                … should we ask for help?

                … could this cause a problem?

                … should we revisit this issue to assess?

Why         … do we think this is a problem?

                … is this relevant to me (or us)?

                … is this the best solution for now?

                … has it been this way for so long?

                … have we allowed this to happen?

How          … does this benefit me, us, or others?

                … does this harm me, us, or others?

                … does this change things?

                … do we know the truth about this?

You can ask those you’re communicating with — or yourself — any of these questions or any combination of them. You can also come up with your own similar questions! These are just a guide to help get you started. There’s no limit to the amount or quality of good questions you can ask. Sprinkle these into your conversations and discussions as appropriate.

These questions, while decent inspiration, are quite stiff. “When should we revisit this issue to assess?” sounds halting and jerky. You’re not a robot, are you? Don’t ask it like that! Try to sound human. Say something like “Hey, uh, everybody? When can we follow up on this in a week or so to uhh, you know, check we’re doing alright?” You know, how people talk.  

The Shape of Critical Thinking

Good critical thinking interrogates an idea or problem purposefully, whether that is individually or together. Hopefully this is done in a spirit of making progress. In practice, what critical thinking looks like can vary. There’s no one way to perform critical thinking to be proper, thorough, or fair.

What’s more is that critical thinking isn’t just for relationships and the problems we face in them. Critical thinking is, at an even broader level, often about our human relationships with information: as we consume it, as we interact with it (and people spewing it off), and as we sift through the bombardments of information, advertisements, and messages that constantly pelt us like radioactive symbolic fallout. Critical thinking is your built-in BS detector.

Critical thinking is a tool for life. Use that brain evolution gave you! We should all strive to be better critical thinkers. Question things: authority, motive, tactics, perspective. Question it all, especially those in power and people trying to sell you things.  

A Few Words About Emotions

Critical thinking isn’t a purely rational process. There is no such thing as a purely rational process. Beware those trumpeting their “rationality,” their humanity has likely been corrupted. Emotions are real and powerful. They are relevant and even central when you’re hashing out difficult problems with people. Interrogating others (and yourself) can be emotionally challenging. That’s ok. That’s exactly part of the process of communicating and part of critical thinking. Try to embrace and express authentic emotions appropriately, knowing full well that what’s “appropriate” is always shifting and political . Emotive expressions, when listened to, are evidence of systemic problems that lie beneath. Strive to be flexible to and open to the authentic expressions of others. You can’t tell people in pain to suppress emotions.  

Critical thinking is hard. We don’t do it enough. It’s easy to *not* do it, because you have to actively engage  in its practice. The residuals of evolution are pulling you in the other direction. Your monkey brain wants shortcuts, but you have to fight against this. Critical thinking improves communication. And good communication influences critical thinking. The relationship is reciprocal.

Hashing out an idea with someone, critical thinking with them, is bond-forming. When you are able to rigorously vet and work out an idea or problem with another person, regardless of the size or type or shape of that problem, you are forming a bond with them. You are connecting. You are making something better. Engage in it. Surrender to the process. Get in there and mix it up.

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Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is a widely accepted educational goal. Its definition is contested, but the competing definitions can be understood as differing conceptions of the same basic concept: careful thinking directed to a goal. Conceptions differ with respect to the scope of such thinking, the type of goal, the criteria and norms for thinking carefully, and the thinking components on which they focus. Its adoption as an educational goal has been recommended on the basis of respect for students’ autonomy and preparing students for success in life and for democratic citizenship. “Critical thinkers” have the dispositions and abilities that lead them to think critically when appropriate. The abilities can be identified directly; the dispositions indirectly, by considering what factors contribute to or impede exercise of the abilities. Standardized tests have been developed to assess the degree to which a person possesses such dispositions and abilities. Educational intervention has been shown experimentally to improve them, particularly when it includes dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring. Controversies have arisen over the generalizability of critical thinking across domains, over alleged bias in critical thinking theories and instruction, and over the relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking.

2.1 Dewey’s Three Main Examples

2.2 dewey’s other examples, 2.3 further examples, 2.4 non-examples, 3. the definition of critical thinking, 4. its value, 5. the process of thinking critically, 6. components of the process, 7. contributory dispositions and abilities, 8.1 initiating dispositions, 8.2 internal dispositions, 9. critical thinking abilities, 10. required knowledge, 11. educational methods, 12.1 the generalizability of critical thinking, 12.2 bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, 12.3 relationship of critical thinking to other types of thinking, other internet resources, related entries.

Use of the term ‘critical thinking’ to describe an educational goal goes back to the American philosopher John Dewey (1910), who more commonly called it ‘reflective thinking’. He defined it as

active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends. (Dewey 1910: 6; 1933: 9)

and identified a habit of such consideration with a scientific attitude of mind. His lengthy quotations of Francis Bacon, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill indicate that he was not the first person to propose development of a scientific attitude of mind as an educational goal.

In the 1930s, many of the schools that participated in the Eight-Year Study of the Progressive Education Association (Aikin 1942) adopted critical thinking as an educational goal, for whose achievement the study’s Evaluation Staff developed tests (Smith, Tyler, & Evaluation Staff 1942). Glaser (1941) showed experimentally that it was possible to improve the critical thinking of high school students. Bloom’s influential taxonomy of cognitive educational objectives (Bloom et al. 1956) incorporated critical thinking abilities. Ennis (1962) proposed 12 aspects of critical thinking as a basis for research on the teaching and evaluation of critical thinking ability.

Since 1980, an annual international conference in California on critical thinking and educational reform has attracted tens of thousands of educators from all levels of education and from many parts of the world. Also since 1980, the state university system in California has required all undergraduate students to take a critical thinking course. Since 1983, the Association for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking has sponsored sessions in conjunction with the divisional meetings of the American Philosophical Association (APA). In 1987, the APA’s Committee on Pre-College Philosophy commissioned a consensus statement on critical thinking for purposes of educational assessment and instruction (Facione 1990a). Researchers have developed standardized tests of critical thinking abilities and dispositions; for details, see the Supplement on Assessment . Educational jurisdictions around the world now include critical thinking in guidelines for curriculum and assessment.

For details on this history, see the Supplement on History .

2. Examples and Non-Examples

Before considering the definition of critical thinking, it will be helpful to have in mind some examples of critical thinking, as well as some examples of kinds of thinking that would apparently not count as critical thinking.

Dewey (1910: 68–71; 1933: 91–94) takes as paradigms of reflective thinking three class papers of students in which they describe their thinking. The examples range from the everyday to the scientific.

Transit : “The other day, when I was down town on 16th Street, a clock caught my eye. I saw that the hands pointed to 12:20. This suggested that I had an engagement at 124th Street, at one o’clock. I reasoned that as it had taken me an hour to come down on a surface car, I should probably be twenty minutes late if I returned the same way. I might save twenty minutes by a subway express. But was there a station near? If not, I might lose more than twenty minutes in looking for one. Then I thought of the elevated, and I saw there was such a line within two blocks. But where was the station? If it were several blocks above or below the street I was on, I should lose time instead of gaining it. My mind went back to the subway express as quicker than the elevated; furthermore, I remembered that it went nearer than the elevated to the part of 124th Street I wished to reach, so that time would be saved at the end of the journey. I concluded in favor of the subway, and reached my destination by one o’clock.” (Dewey 1910: 68–69; 1933: 91–92)

Ferryboat : “Projecting nearly horizontally from the upper deck of the ferryboat on which I daily cross the river is a long white pole, having a gilded ball at its tip. It suggested a flagpole when I first saw it; its color, shape, and gilded ball agreed with this idea, and these reasons seemed to justify me in this belief. But soon difficulties presented themselves. The pole was nearly horizontal, an unusual position for a flagpole; in the next place, there was no pulley, ring, or cord by which to attach a flag; finally, there were elsewhere on the boat two vertical staffs from which flags were occasionally flown. It seemed probable that the pole was not there for flag-flying.

“I then tried to imagine all possible purposes of the pole, and to consider for which of these it was best suited: (a) Possibly it was an ornament. But as all the ferryboats and even the tugboats carried poles, this hypothesis was rejected. (b) Possibly it was the terminal of a wireless telegraph. But the same considerations made this improbable. Besides, the more natural place for such a terminal would be the highest part of the boat, on top of the pilot house. (c) Its purpose might be to point out the direction in which the boat is moving.

“In support of this conclusion, I discovered that the pole was lower than the pilot house, so that the steersman could easily see it. Moreover, the tip was enough higher than the base, so that, from the pilot’s position, it must appear to project far out in front of the boat. Moreover, the pilot being near the front of the boat, he would need some such guide as to its direction. Tugboats would also need poles for such a purpose. This hypothesis was so much more probable than the others that I accepted it. I formed the conclusion that the pole was set up for the purpose of showing the pilot the direction in which the boat pointed, to enable him to steer correctly.” (Dewey 1910: 69–70; 1933: 92–93)

Bubbles : “In washing tumblers in hot soapsuds and placing them mouth downward on a plate, bubbles appeared on the outside of the mouth of the tumblers and then went inside. Why? The presence of bubbles suggests air, which I note must come from inside the tumbler. I see that the soapy water on the plate prevents escape of the air save as it may be caught in bubbles. But why should air leave the tumbler? There was no substance entering to force it out. It must have expanded. It expands by increase of heat, or by decrease of pressure, or both. Could the air have become heated after the tumbler was taken from the hot suds? Clearly not the air that was already entangled in the water. If heated air was the cause, cold air must have entered in transferring the tumblers from the suds to the plate. I test to see if this supposition is true by taking several more tumblers out. Some I shake so as to make sure of entrapping cold air in them. Some I take out holding mouth downward in order to prevent cold air from entering. Bubbles appear on the outside of every one of the former and on none of the latter. I must be right in my inference. Air from the outside must have been expanded by the heat of the tumbler, which explains the appearance of the bubbles on the outside. But why do they then go inside? Cold contracts. The tumbler cooled and also the air inside it. Tension was removed, and hence bubbles appeared inside. To be sure of this, I test by placing a cup of ice on the tumbler while the bubbles are still forming outside. They soon reverse” (Dewey 1910: 70–71; 1933: 93–94).

Dewey (1910, 1933) sprinkles his book with other examples of critical thinking. We will refer to the following.

Weather : A man on a walk notices that it has suddenly become cool, thinks that it is probably going to rain, looks up and sees a dark cloud obscuring the sun, and quickens his steps (1910: 6–10; 1933: 9–13).

Disorder : A man finds his rooms on his return to them in disorder with his belongings thrown about, thinks at first of burglary as an explanation, then thinks of mischievous children as being an alternative explanation, then looks to see whether valuables are missing, and discovers that they are (1910: 82–83; 1933: 166–168).

Typhoid : A physician diagnosing a patient whose conspicuous symptoms suggest typhoid avoids drawing a conclusion until more data are gathered by questioning the patient and by making tests (1910: 85–86; 1933: 170).

Blur : A moving blur catches our eye in the distance, we ask ourselves whether it is a cloud of whirling dust or a tree moving its branches or a man signaling to us, we think of other traits that should be found on each of those possibilities, and we look and see if those traits are found (1910: 102, 108; 1933: 121, 133).

Suction pump : In thinking about the suction pump, the scientist first notes that it will draw water only to a maximum height of 33 feet at sea level and to a lesser maximum height at higher elevations, selects for attention the differing atmospheric pressure at these elevations, sets up experiments in which the air is removed from a vessel containing water (when suction no longer works) and in which the weight of air at various levels is calculated, compares the results of reasoning about the height to which a given weight of air will allow a suction pump to raise water with the observed maximum height at different elevations, and finally assimilates the suction pump to such apparently different phenomena as the siphon and the rising of a balloon (1910: 150–153; 1933: 195–198).

Diamond : A passenger in a car driving in a diamond lane reserved for vehicles with at least one passenger notices that the diamond marks on the pavement are far apart in some places and close together in others. Why? The driver suggests that the reason may be that the diamond marks are not needed where there is a solid double line separating the diamond lane from the adjoining lane, but are needed when there is a dotted single line permitting crossing into the diamond lane. Further observation confirms that the diamonds are close together when a dotted line separates the diamond lane from its neighbour, but otherwise far apart.

Rash : A woman suddenly develops a very itchy red rash on her throat and upper chest. She recently noticed a mark on the back of her right hand, but was not sure whether the mark was a rash or a scrape. She lies down in bed and thinks about what might be causing the rash and what to do about it. About two weeks before, she began taking blood pressure medication that contained a sulfa drug, and the pharmacist had warned her, in view of a previous allergic reaction to a medication containing a sulfa drug, to be on the alert for an allergic reaction; however, she had been taking the medication for two weeks with no such effect. The day before, she began using a new cream on her neck and upper chest; against the new cream as the cause was mark on the back of her hand, which had not been exposed to the cream. She began taking probiotics about a month before. She also recently started new eye drops, but she supposed that manufacturers of eye drops would be careful not to include allergy-causing components in the medication. The rash might be a heat rash, since she recently was sweating profusely from her upper body. Since she is about to go away on a short vacation, where she would not have access to her usual physician, she decides to keep taking the probiotics and using the new eye drops but to discontinue the blood pressure medication and to switch back to the old cream for her neck and upper chest. She forms a plan to consult her regular physician on her return about the blood pressure medication.

Candidate : Although Dewey included no examples of thinking directed at appraising the arguments of others, such thinking has come to be considered a kind of critical thinking. We find an example of such thinking in the performance task on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA+), which its sponsoring organization describes as

a performance-based assessment that provides a measure of an institution’s contribution to the development of critical-thinking and written communication skills of its students. (Council for Aid to Education 2017)

A sample task posted on its website requires the test-taker to write a report for public distribution evaluating a fictional candidate’s policy proposals and their supporting arguments, using supplied background documents, with a recommendation on whether to endorse the candidate.

Immediate acceptance of an idea that suggests itself as a solution to a problem (e.g., a possible explanation of an event or phenomenon, an action that seems likely to produce a desired result) is “uncritical thinking, the minimum of reflection” (Dewey 1910: 13). On-going suspension of judgment in the light of doubt about a possible solution is not critical thinking (Dewey 1910: 108). Critique driven by a dogmatically held political or religious ideology is not critical thinking; thus Paulo Freire (1968 [1970]) is using the term (e.g., at 1970: 71, 81, 100, 146) in a more politically freighted sense that includes not only reflection but also revolutionary action against oppression. Derivation of a conclusion from given data using an algorithm is not critical thinking.

What is critical thinking? There are many definitions. Ennis (2016) lists 14 philosophically oriented scholarly definitions and three dictionary definitions. Following Rawls (1971), who distinguished his conception of justice from a utilitarian conception but regarded them as rival conceptions of the same concept, Ennis maintains that the 17 definitions are different conceptions of the same concept. Rawls articulated the shared concept of justice as

a characteristic set of principles for assigning basic rights and duties and for determining… the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. (Rawls 1971: 5)

Bailin et al. (1999b) claim that, if one considers what sorts of thinking an educator would take not to be critical thinking and what sorts to be critical thinking, one can conclude that educators typically understand critical thinking to have at least three features.

• It is done for the purpose of making up one’s mind about what to believe or do.
• The person engaging in the thinking is trying to fulfill standards of adequacy and accuracy appropriate to the thinking.
• The thinking fulfills the relevant standards to some threshold level.

One could sum up the core concept that involves these three features by saying that critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking. This core concept seems to apply to all the examples of critical thinking described in the previous section. As for the non-examples, their exclusion depends on construing careful thinking as excluding jumping immediately to conclusions, suspending judgment no matter how strong the evidence, reasoning from an unquestioned ideological or religious perspective, and routinely using an algorithm to answer a question.

If the core of critical thinking is careful goal-directed thinking, conceptions of it can vary according to its presumed scope, its presumed goal, one’s criteria and threshold for being careful, and the thinking component on which one focuses. As to its scope, some conceptions (e.g., Dewey 1910, 1933) restrict it to constructive thinking on the basis of one’s own observations and experiments, others (e.g., Ennis 1962; Fisher & Scriven 1997; Johnson 1992) to appraisal of the products of such thinking. Ennis (1991) and Bailin et al. (1999b) take it to cover both construction and appraisal. As to its goal, some conceptions restrict it to forming a judgment (Dewey 1910, 1933; Lipman 1987; Facione 1990a). Others allow for actions as well as beliefs as the end point of a process of critical thinking (Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b). As to the criteria and threshold for being careful, definitions vary in the term used to indicate that critical thinking satisfies certain norms: “intellectually disciplined” (Scriven & Paul 1987), “reasonable” (Ennis 1991), “skillful” (Lipman 1987), “skilled” (Fisher & Scriven 1997), “careful” (Bailin & Battersby 2009). Some definitions specify these norms, referring variously to “consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (Dewey 1910, 1933); “the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning” (Glaser 1941); “conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication” (Scriven & Paul 1987); the requirement that “it is sensitive to context, relies on criteria, and is self-correcting” (Lipman 1987); “evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations” (Facione 1990a); and “plus-minus considerations of the product in terms of appropriate standards (or criteria)” (Johnson 1992). Stanovich and Stanovich (2010) propose to ground the concept of critical thinking in the concept of rationality, which they understand as combining epistemic rationality (fitting one’s beliefs to the world) and instrumental rationality (optimizing goal fulfillment); a critical thinker, in their view, is someone with “a propensity to override suboptimal responses from the autonomous mind” (2010: 227). These variant specifications of norms for critical thinking are not necessarily incompatible with one another, and in any case presuppose the core notion of thinking carefully. As to the thinking component singled out, some definitions focus on suspension of judgment during the thinking (Dewey 1910; McPeck 1981), others on inquiry while judgment is suspended (Bailin & Battersby 2009, 2021), others on the resulting judgment (Facione 1990a), and still others on responsiveness to reasons (Siegel 1988). Kuhn (2019) takes critical thinking to be more a dialogic practice of advancing and responding to arguments than an individual ability.

In educational contexts, a definition of critical thinking is a “programmatic definition” (Scheffler 1960: 19). It expresses a practical program for achieving an educational goal. For this purpose, a one-sentence formulaic definition is much less useful than articulation of a critical thinking process, with criteria and standards for the kinds of thinking that the process may involve. The real educational goal is recognition, adoption and implementation by students of those criteria and standards. That adoption and implementation in turn consists in acquiring the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker.

Conceptions of critical thinking generally do not include moral integrity as part of the concept. Dewey, for example, took critical thinking to be the ultimate intellectual goal of education, but distinguished it from the development of social cooperation among school children, which he took to be the central moral goal. Ennis (1996, 2011) added to his previous list of critical thinking dispositions a group of dispositions to care about the dignity and worth of every person, which he described as a “correlative” (1996) disposition without which critical thinking would be less valuable and perhaps harmful. An educational program that aimed at developing critical thinking but not the correlative disposition to care about the dignity and worth of every person, he asserted, “would be deficient and perhaps dangerous” (Ennis 1996: 172).

Dewey thought that education for reflective thinking would be of value to both the individual and society; recognition in educational practice of the kinship to the scientific attitude of children’s native curiosity, fertile imagination and love of experimental inquiry “would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste” (Dewey 1910: iii). Schools participating in the Eight-Year Study took development of the habit of reflective thinking and skill in solving problems as a means to leading young people to understand, appreciate and live the democratic way of life characteristic of the United States (Aikin 1942: 17–18, 81). Harvey Siegel (1988: 55–61) has offered four considerations in support of adopting critical thinking as an educational ideal. (1) Respect for persons requires that schools and teachers honour students’ demands for reasons and explanations, deal with students honestly, and recognize the need to confront students’ independent judgment; these requirements concern the manner in which teachers treat students. (2) Education has the task of preparing children to be successful adults, a task that requires development of their self-sufficiency. (3) Education should initiate children into the rational traditions in such fields as history, science and mathematics. (4) Education should prepare children to become democratic citizens, which requires reasoned procedures and critical talents and attitudes. To supplement these considerations, Siegel (1988: 62–90) responds to two objections: the ideology objection that adoption of any educational ideal requires a prior ideological commitment and the indoctrination objection that cultivation of critical thinking cannot escape being a form of indoctrination.

Despite the diversity of our 11 examples, one can recognize a common pattern. Dewey analyzed it as consisting of five phases:

• suggestions , in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution;
• an intellectualization of the difficulty or perplexity into a problem to be solved, a question for which the answer must be sought;
• the use of one suggestion after another as a leading idea, or hypothesis , to initiate and guide observation and other operations in collection of factual material;
• the mental elaboration of the idea or supposition as an idea or supposition ( reasoning , in the sense on which reasoning is a part, not the whole, of inference); and
• testing the hypothesis by overt or imaginative action. (Dewey 1933: 106–107; italics in original)

The process of reflective thinking consisting of these phases would be preceded by a perplexed, troubled or confused situation and followed by a cleared-up, unified, resolved situation (Dewey 1933: 106). The term ‘phases’ replaced the term ‘steps’ (Dewey 1910: 72), thus removing the earlier suggestion of an invariant sequence. Variants of the above analysis appeared in (Dewey 1916: 177) and (Dewey 1938: 101–119).

The variant formulations indicate the difficulty of giving a single logical analysis of such a varied process. The process of critical thinking may have a spiral pattern, with the problem being redefined in the light of obstacles to solving it as originally formulated. For example, the person in Transit might have concluded that getting to the appointment at the scheduled time was impossible and have reformulated the problem as that of rescheduling the appointment for a mutually convenient time. Further, defining a problem does not always follow after or lead immediately to an idea of a suggested solution. Nor should it do so, as Dewey himself recognized in describing the physician in Typhoid as avoiding any strong preference for this or that conclusion before getting further information (Dewey 1910: 85; 1933: 170). People with a hypothesis in mind, even one to which they have a very weak commitment, have a so-called “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998): they are likely to pay attention to evidence that confirms the hypothesis and to ignore evidence that counts against it or for some competing hypothesis. Detectives, intelligence agencies, and investigators of airplane accidents are well advised to gather relevant evidence systematically and to postpone even tentative adoption of an explanatory hypothesis until the collected evidence rules out with the appropriate degree of certainty all but one explanation. Dewey’s analysis of the critical thinking process can be faulted as well for requiring acceptance or rejection of a possible solution to a defined problem, with no allowance for deciding in the light of the available evidence to suspend judgment. Further, given the great variety of kinds of problems for which reflection is appropriate, there is likely to be variation in its component events. Perhaps the best way to conceptualize the critical thinking process is as a checklist whose component events can occur in a variety of orders, selectively, and more than once. These component events might include (1) noticing a difficulty, (2) defining the problem, (3) dividing the problem into manageable sub-problems, (4) formulating a variety of possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (5) determining what evidence is relevant to deciding among possible solutions to the problem or sub-problem, (6) devising a plan of systematic observation or experiment that will uncover the relevant evidence, (7) carrying out the plan of systematic observation or experimentation, (8) noting the results of the systematic observation or experiment, (9) gathering relevant testimony and information from others, (10) judging the credibility of testimony and information gathered from others, (11) drawing conclusions from gathered evidence and accepted testimony, and (12) accepting a solution that the evidence adequately supports (cf. Hitchcock 2017: 485).

Checklist conceptions of the process of critical thinking are open to the objection that they are too mechanical and procedural to fit the multi-dimensional and emotionally charged issues for which critical thinking is urgently needed (Paul 1984). For such issues, a more dialectical process is advocated, in which competing relevant world views are identified, their implications explored, and some sort of creative synthesis attempted.

If one considers the critical thinking process illustrated by the 11 examples, one can identify distinct kinds of mental acts and mental states that form part of it. To distinguish, label and briefly characterize these components is a useful preliminary to identifying abilities, skills, dispositions, attitudes, habits and the like that contribute causally to thinking critically. Identifying such abilities and habits is in turn a useful preliminary to setting educational goals. Setting the goals is in its turn a useful preliminary to designing strategies for helping learners to achieve the goals and to designing ways of measuring the extent to which learners have done so. Such measures provide both feedback to learners on their achievement and a basis for experimental research on the effectiveness of various strategies for educating people to think critically. Let us begin, then, by distinguishing the kinds of mental acts and mental events that can occur in a critical thinking process.

• Observing : One notices something in one’s immediate environment (sudden cooling of temperature in Weather , bubbles forming outside a glass and then going inside in Bubbles , a moving blur in the distance in Blur , a rash in Rash ). Or one notes the results of an experiment or systematic observation (valuables missing in Disorder , no suction without air pressure in Suction pump )
• Feeling : One feels puzzled or uncertain about something (how to get to an appointment on time in Transit , why the diamonds vary in spacing in Diamond ). One wants to resolve this perplexity. One feels satisfaction once one has worked out an answer (to take the subway express in Transit , diamonds closer when needed as a warning in Diamond ).
• Wondering : One formulates a question to be addressed (why bubbles form outside a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , how suction pumps work in Suction pump , what caused the rash in Rash ).
• Imagining : One thinks of possible answers (bus or subway or elevated in Transit , flagpole or ornament or wireless communication aid or direction indicator in Ferryboat , allergic reaction or heat rash in Rash ).
• Inferring : One works out what would be the case if a possible answer were assumed (valuables missing if there has been a burglary in Disorder , earlier start to the rash if it is an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug in Rash ). Or one draws a conclusion once sufficient relevant evidence is gathered (take the subway in Transit , burglary in Disorder , discontinue blood pressure medication and new cream in Rash ).
• Knowledge : One uses stored knowledge of the subject-matter to generate possible answers or to infer what would be expected on the assumption of a particular answer (knowledge of a city’s public transit system in Transit , of the requirements for a flagpole in Ferryboat , of Boyle’s law in Bubbles , of allergic reactions in Rash ).
• Experimenting : One designs and carries out an experiment or a systematic observation to find out whether the results deduced from a possible answer will occur (looking at the location of the flagpole in relation to the pilot’s position in Ferryboat , putting an ice cube on top of a tumbler taken from hot water in Bubbles , measuring the height to which a suction pump will draw water at different elevations in Suction pump , noticing the spacing of diamonds when movement to or from a diamond lane is allowed in Diamond ).
• Consulting : One finds a source of information, gets the information from the source, and makes a judgment on whether to accept it. None of our 11 examples include searching for sources of information. In this respect they are unrepresentative, since most people nowadays have almost instant access to information relevant to answering any question, including many of those illustrated by the examples. However, Candidate includes the activities of extracting information from sources and evaluating its credibility.
• Identifying and analyzing arguments : One notices an argument and works out its structure and content as a preliminary to evaluating its strength. This activity is central to Candidate . It is an important part of a critical thinking process in which one surveys arguments for various positions on an issue.
• Judging : One makes a judgment on the basis of accumulated evidence and reasoning, such as the judgment in Ferryboat that the purpose of the pole is to provide direction to the pilot.
• Deciding : One makes a decision on what to do or on what policy to adopt, as in the decision in Transit to take the subway.

By definition, a person who does something voluntarily is both willing and able to do that thing at that time. Both the willingness and the ability contribute causally to the person’s action, in the sense that the voluntary action would not occur if either (or both) of these were lacking. For example, suppose that one is standing with one’s arms at one’s sides and one voluntarily lifts one’s right arm to an extended horizontal position. One would not do so if one were unable to lift one’s arm, if for example one’s right side was paralyzed as the result of a stroke. Nor would one do so if one were unwilling to lift one’s arm, if for example one were participating in a street demonstration at which a white supremacist was urging the crowd to lift their right arm in a Nazi salute and one were unwilling to express support in this way for the racist Nazi ideology. The same analysis applies to a voluntary mental process of thinking critically. It requires both willingness and ability to think critically, including willingness and ability to perform each of the mental acts that compose the process and to coordinate those acts in a sequence that is directed at resolving the initiating perplexity.

Consider willingness first. We can identify causal contributors to willingness to think critically by considering factors that would cause a person who was able to think critically about an issue nevertheless not to do so (Hamby 2014). For each factor, the opposite condition thus contributes causally to willingness to think critically on a particular occasion. For example, people who habitually jump to conclusions without considering alternatives will not think critically about issues that arise, even if they have the required abilities. The contrary condition of willingness to suspend judgment is thus a causal contributor to thinking critically.

Now consider ability. In contrast to the ability to move one’s arm, which can be completely absent because a stroke has left the arm paralyzed, the ability to think critically is a developed ability, whose absence is not a complete absence of ability to think but absence of ability to think well. We can identify the ability to think well directly, in terms of the norms and standards for good thinking. In general, to be able do well the thinking activities that can be components of a critical thinking process, one needs to know the concepts and principles that characterize their good performance, to recognize in particular cases that the concepts and principles apply, and to apply them. The knowledge, recognition and application may be procedural rather than declarative. It may be domain-specific rather than widely applicable, and in either case may need subject-matter knowledge, sometimes of a deep kind.

Reflections of the sort illustrated by the previous two paragraphs have led scholars to identify the knowledge, abilities and dispositions of a “critical thinker”, i.e., someone who thinks critically whenever it is appropriate to do so. We turn now to these three types of causal contributors to thinking critically. We start with dispositions, since arguably these are the most powerful contributors to being a critical thinker, can be fostered at an early stage of a child’s development, and are susceptible to general improvement (Glaser 1941: 175)

8. Critical Thinking Dispositions

Educational researchers use the term ‘dispositions’ broadly for the habits of mind and attitudes that contribute causally to being a critical thinker. Some writers (e.g., Paul & Elder 2006; Hamby 2014; Bailin & Battersby 2016a) propose to use the term ‘virtues’ for this dimension of a critical thinker. The virtues in question, although they are virtues of character, concern the person’s ways of thinking rather than the person’s ways of behaving towards others. They are not moral virtues but intellectual virtues, of the sort articulated by Zagzebski (1996) and discussed by Turri, Alfano, and Greco (2017).

On a realistic conception, thinking dispositions or intellectual virtues are real properties of thinkers. They are general tendencies, propensities, or inclinations to think in particular ways in particular circumstances, and can be genuinely explanatory (Siegel 1999). Sceptics argue that there is no evidence for a specific mental basis for the habits of mind that contribute to thinking critically, and that it is pedagogically misleading to posit such a basis (Bailin et al. 1999a). Whatever their status, critical thinking dispositions need motivation for their initial formation in a child—motivation that may be external or internal. As children develop, the force of habit will gradually become important in sustaining the disposition (Nieto & Valenzuela 2012). Mere force of habit, however, is unlikely to sustain critical thinking dispositions. Critical thinkers must value and enjoy using their knowledge and abilities to think things through for themselves. They must be committed to, and lovers of, inquiry.

A person may have a critical thinking disposition with respect to only some kinds of issues. For example, one could be open-minded about scientific issues but not about religious issues. Similarly, one could be confident in one’s ability to reason about the theological implications of the existence of evil in the world but not in one’s ability to reason about the best design for a guided ballistic missile.

Facione (1990a: 25) divides “affective dispositions” of critical thinking into approaches to life and living in general and approaches to specific issues, questions or problems. Adapting this distinction, one can usefully divide critical thinking dispositions into initiating dispositions (those that contribute causally to starting to think critically about an issue) and internal dispositions (those that contribute causally to doing a good job of thinking critically once one has started). The two categories are not mutually exclusive. For example, open-mindedness, in the sense of willingness to consider alternative points of view to one’s own, is both an initiating and an internal disposition.

Using the strategy of considering factors that would block people with the ability to think critically from doing so, we can identify as initiating dispositions for thinking critically attentiveness, a habit of inquiry, self-confidence, courage, open-mindedness, willingness to suspend judgment, trust in reason, wanting evidence for one’s beliefs, and seeking the truth. We consider briefly what each of these dispositions amounts to, in each case citing sources that acknowledge them.

• Attentiveness : One will not think critically if one fails to recognize an issue that needs to be thought through. For example, the pedestrian in Weather would not have looked up if he had not noticed that the air was suddenly cooler. To be a critical thinker, then, one needs to be habitually attentive to one’s surroundings, noticing not only what one senses but also sources of perplexity in messages received and in one’s own beliefs and attitudes (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
• Habit of inquiry : Inquiry is effortful, and one needs an internal push to engage in it. For example, the student in Bubbles could easily have stopped at idle wondering about the cause of the bubbles rather than reasoning to a hypothesis, then designing and executing an experiment to test it. Thus willingness to think critically needs mental energy and initiative. What can supply that energy? Love of inquiry, or perhaps just a habit of inquiry. Hamby (2015) has argued that willingness to inquire is the central critical thinking virtue, one that encompasses all the others. It is recognized as a critical thinking disposition by Dewey (1910: 29; 1933: 35), Glaser (1941: 5), Ennis (1987: 12; 1991: 8), Facione (1990a: 25), Bailin et al. (1999b: 294), Halpern (1998: 452), and Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo (2001).
• Self-confidence : Lack of confidence in one’s abilities can block critical thinking. For example, if the woman in Rash lacked confidence in her ability to figure things out for herself, she might just have assumed that the rash on her chest was the allergic reaction to her medication against which the pharmacist had warned her. Thus willingness to think critically requires confidence in one’s ability to inquire (Facione 1990a: 25; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001).
• Courage : Fear of thinking for oneself can stop one from doing it. Thus willingness to think critically requires intellectual courage (Paul & Elder 2006: 16).
• Open-mindedness : A dogmatic attitude will impede thinking critically. For example, a person who adheres rigidly to a “pro-choice” position on the issue of the legal status of induced abortion is likely to be unwilling to consider seriously the issue of when in its development an unborn child acquires a moral right to life. Thus willingness to think critically requires open-mindedness, in the sense of a willingness to examine questions to which one already accepts an answer but which further evidence or reasoning might cause one to answer differently (Dewey 1933; Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Bailin et al. 1999b; Halpern 1998, Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). Paul (1981) emphasizes open-mindedness about alternative world-views, and recommends a dialectical approach to integrating such views as central to what he calls “strong sense” critical thinking. In three studies, Haran, Ritov, & Mellers (2013) found that actively open-minded thinking, including “the tendency to weigh new evidence against a favored belief, to spend sufficient time on a problem before giving up, and to consider carefully the opinions of others in forming one’s own”, led study participants to acquire information and thus to make accurate estimations.
• Willingness to suspend judgment : Premature closure on an initial solution will block critical thinking. Thus willingness to think critically requires a willingness to suspend judgment while alternatives are explored (Facione 1990a; Ennis 1991; Halpern 1998).
• Trust in reason : Since distrust in the processes of reasoned inquiry will dissuade one from engaging in it, trust in them is an initiating critical thinking disposition (Facione 1990a, 25; Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001; Paul & Elder 2006). In reaction to an allegedly exclusive emphasis on reason in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, Thayer-Bacon (2000) argues that intuition, imagination, and emotion have important roles to play in an adequate conception of critical thinking that she calls “constructive thinking”. From her point of view, critical thinking requires trust not only in reason but also in intuition, imagination, and emotion.
• Seeking the truth : If one does not care about the truth but is content to stick with one’s initial bias on an issue, then one will not think critically about it. Seeking the truth is thus an initiating critical thinking disposition (Bailin et al. 1999b: 294; Facione, Facione, & Giancarlo 2001). A disposition to seek the truth is implicit in more specific critical thinking dispositions, such as trying to be well-informed, considering seriously points of view other than one’s own, looking for alternatives, suspending judgment when the evidence is insufficient, and adopting a position when the evidence supporting it is sufficient.

Some of the initiating dispositions, such as open-mindedness and willingness to suspend judgment, are also internal critical thinking dispositions, in the sense of mental habits or attitudes that contribute causally to doing a good job of critical thinking once one starts the process. But there are many other internal critical thinking dispositions. Some of them are parasitic on one’s conception of good thinking. For example, it is constitutive of good thinking about an issue to formulate the issue clearly and to maintain focus on it. For this purpose, one needs not only the corresponding ability but also the corresponding disposition. Ennis (1991: 8) describes it as the disposition “to determine and maintain focus on the conclusion or question”, Facione (1990a: 25) as “clarity in stating the question or concern”. Other internal dispositions are motivators to continue or adjust the critical thinking process, such as willingness to persist in a complex task and willingness to abandon nonproductive strategies in an attempt to self-correct (Halpern 1998: 452). For a list of identified internal critical thinking dispositions, see the Supplement on Internal Critical Thinking Dispositions .

Some theorists postulate skills, i.e., acquired abilities, as operative in critical thinking. It is not obvious, however, that a good mental act is the exercise of a generic acquired skill. Inferring an expected time of arrival, as in Transit , has some generic components but also uses non-generic subject-matter knowledge. Bailin et al. (1999a) argue against viewing critical thinking skills as generic and discrete, on the ground that skilled performance at a critical thinking task cannot be separated from knowledge of concepts and from domain-specific principles of good thinking. Talk of skills, they concede, is unproblematic if it means merely that a person with critical thinking skills is capable of intelligent performance.

Despite such scepticism, theorists of critical thinking have listed as general contributors to critical thinking what they variously call abilities (Glaser 1941; Ennis 1962, 1991), skills (Facione 1990a; Halpern 1998) or competencies (Fisher & Scriven 1997). Amalgamating these lists would produce a confusing and chaotic cornucopia of more than 50 possible educational objectives, with only partial overlap among them. It makes sense instead to try to understand the reasons for the multiplicity and diversity, and to make a selection according to one’s own reasons for singling out abilities to be developed in a critical thinking curriculum. Two reasons for diversity among lists of critical thinking abilities are the underlying conception of critical thinking and the envisaged educational level. Appraisal-only conceptions, for example, involve a different suite of abilities than constructive-only conceptions. Some lists, such as those in (Glaser 1941), are put forward as educational objectives for secondary school students, whereas others are proposed as objectives for college students (e.g., Facione 1990a).

The abilities described in the remaining paragraphs of this section emerge from reflection on the general abilities needed to do well the thinking activities identified in section 6 as components of the critical thinking process described in section 5 . The derivation of each collection of abilities is accompanied by citation of sources that list such abilities and of standardized tests that claim to test them.

Observational abilities : Careful and accurate observation sometimes requires specialist expertise and practice, as in the case of observing birds and observing accident scenes. However, there are general abilities of noticing what one’s senses are picking up from one’s environment and of being able to articulate clearly and accurately to oneself and others what one has observed. It helps in exercising them to be able to recognize and take into account factors that make one’s observation less trustworthy, such as prior framing of the situation, inadequate time, deficient senses, poor observation conditions, and the like. It helps as well to be skilled at taking steps to make one’s observation more trustworthy, such as moving closer to get a better look, measuring something three times and taking the average, and checking what one thinks one is observing with someone else who is in a good position to observe it. It also helps to be skilled at recognizing respects in which one’s report of one’s observation involves inference rather than direct observation, so that one can then consider whether the inference is justified. These abilities come into play as well when one thinks about whether and with what degree of confidence to accept an observation report, for example in the study of history or in a criminal investigation or in assessing news reports. Observational abilities show up in some lists of critical thinking abilities (Ennis 1962: 90; Facione 1990a: 16; Ennis 1991: 9). There are items testing a person’s ability to judge the credibility of observation reports in the Cornell Critical Thinking Tests, Levels X and Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). Norris and King (1983, 1985, 1990a, 1990b) is a test of ability to appraise observation reports.

Emotional abilities : The emotions that drive a critical thinking process are perplexity or puzzlement, a wish to resolve it, and satisfaction at achieving the desired resolution. Children experience these emotions at an early age, without being trained to do so. Education that takes critical thinking as a goal needs only to channel these emotions and to make sure not to stifle them. Collaborative critical thinking benefits from ability to recognize one’s own and others’ emotional commitments and reactions.

Questioning abilities : A critical thinking process needs transformation of an inchoate sense of perplexity into a clear question. Formulating a question well requires not building in questionable assumptions, not prejudging the issue, and using language that in context is unambiguous and precise enough (Ennis 1962: 97; 1991: 9).

Imaginative abilities : Thinking directed at finding the correct causal explanation of a general phenomenon or particular event requires an ability to imagine possible explanations. Thinking about what policy or plan of action to adopt requires generation of options and consideration of possible consequences of each option. Domain knowledge is required for such creative activity, but a general ability to imagine alternatives is helpful and can be nurtured so as to become easier, quicker, more extensive, and deeper (Dewey 1910: 34–39; 1933: 40–47). Facione (1990a) and Halpern (1998) include the ability to imagine alternatives as a critical thinking ability.

Inferential abilities : The ability to draw conclusions from given information, and to recognize with what degree of certainty one’s own or others’ conclusions follow, is universally recognized as a general critical thinking ability. All 11 examples in section 2 of this article include inferences, some from hypotheses or options (as in Transit , Ferryboat and Disorder ), others from something observed (as in Weather and Rash ). None of these inferences is formally valid. Rather, they are licensed by general, sometimes qualified substantive rules of inference (Toulmin 1958) that rest on domain knowledge—that a bus trip takes about the same time in each direction, that the terminal of a wireless telegraph would be located on the highest possible place, that sudden cooling is often followed by rain, that an allergic reaction to a sulfa drug generally shows up soon after one starts taking it. It is a matter of controversy to what extent the specialized ability to deduce conclusions from premisses using formal rules of inference is needed for critical thinking. Dewey (1933) locates logical forms in setting out the products of reflection rather than in the process of reflection. Ennis (1981a), on the other hand, maintains that a liberally-educated person should have the following abilities: to translate natural-language statements into statements using the standard logical operators, to use appropriately the language of necessary and sufficient conditions, to deal with argument forms and arguments containing symbols, to determine whether in virtue of an argument’s form its conclusion follows necessarily from its premisses, to reason with logically complex propositions, and to apply the rules and procedures of deductive logic. Inferential abilities are recognized as critical thinking abilities by Glaser (1941: 6), Facione (1990a: 9), Ennis (1991: 9), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 99, 111), and Halpern (1998: 452). Items testing inferential abilities constitute two of the five subtests of the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (Watson & Glaser 1980a, 1980b, 1994), two of the four sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), three of the seven sections in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005), 11 of the 34 items on Forms A and B of the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992), and a high but variable proportion of the 25 selected-response questions in the Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Experimenting abilities : Knowing how to design and execute an experiment is important not just in scientific research but also in everyday life, as in Rash . Dewey devoted a whole chapter of his How We Think (1910: 145–156; 1933: 190–202) to the superiority of experimentation over observation in advancing knowledge. Experimenting abilities come into play at one remove in appraising reports of scientific studies. Skill in designing and executing experiments includes the acknowledged abilities to appraise evidence (Glaser 1941: 6), to carry out experiments and to apply appropriate statistical inference techniques (Facione 1990a: 9), to judge inductions to an explanatory hypothesis (Ennis 1991: 9), and to recognize the need for an adequately large sample size (Halpern 1998). The Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) includes four items (out of 52) on experimental design. The Collegiate Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) makes room for appraisal of study design in both its performance task and its selected-response questions.

Consulting abilities : Skill at consulting sources of information comes into play when one seeks information to help resolve a problem, as in Candidate . Ability to find and appraise information includes ability to gather and marshal pertinent information (Glaser 1941: 6), to judge whether a statement made by an alleged authority is acceptable (Ennis 1962: 84), to plan a search for desired information (Facione 1990a: 9), and to judge the credibility of a source (Ennis 1991: 9). Ability to judge the credibility of statements is tested by 24 items (out of 76) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level X (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005) and by four items (out of 52) in the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis & Millman 1971; Ennis, Millman, & Tomko 1985, 2005). The College Learning Assessment’s performance task requires evaluation of whether information in documents is credible or unreliable (Council for Aid to Education 2017).

Argument analysis abilities : The ability to identify and analyze arguments contributes to the process of surveying arguments on an issue in order to form one’s own reasoned judgment, as in Candidate . The ability to detect and analyze arguments is recognized as a critical thinking skill by Facione (1990a: 7–8), Ennis (1991: 9) and Halpern (1998). Five items (out of 34) on the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (Facione 1990b, 1992) test skill at argument analysis. The College Learning Assessment (Council for Aid to Education 2017) incorporates argument analysis in its selected-response tests of critical reading and evaluation and of critiquing an argument.

Judging skills and deciding skills : Skill at judging and deciding is skill at recognizing what judgment or decision the available evidence and argument supports, and with what degree of confidence. It is thus a component of the inferential skills already discussed.

Lists and tests of critical thinking abilities often include two more abilities: identifying assumptions and constructing and evaluating definitions.

In addition to dispositions and abilities, critical thinking needs knowledge: of critical thinking concepts, of critical thinking principles, and of the subject-matter of the thinking.

We can derive a short list of concepts whose understanding contributes to critical thinking from the critical thinking abilities described in the preceding section. Observational abilities require an understanding of the difference between observation and inference. Questioning abilities require an understanding of the concepts of ambiguity and vagueness. Inferential abilities require an understanding of the difference between conclusive and defeasible inference (traditionally, between deduction and induction), as well as of the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. Experimenting abilities require an understanding of the concepts of hypothesis, null hypothesis, assumption and prediction, as well as of the concept of statistical significance and of its difference from importance. They also require an understanding of the difference between an experiment and an observational study, and in particular of the difference between a randomized controlled trial, a prospective correlational study and a retrospective (case-control) study. Argument analysis abilities require an understanding of the concepts of argument, premiss, assumption, conclusion and counter-consideration. Additional critical thinking concepts are proposed by Bailin et al. (1999b: 293), Fisher & Scriven (1997: 105–106), Black (2012), and Blair (2021).

According to Glaser (1941: 25), ability to think critically requires knowledge of the methods of logical inquiry and reasoning. If we review the list of abilities in the preceding section, however, we can see that some of them can be acquired and exercised merely through practice, possibly guided in an educational setting, followed by feedback. Searching intelligently for a causal explanation of some phenomenon or event requires that one consider a full range of possible causal contributors, but it seems more important that one implements this principle in one’s practice than that one is able to articulate it. What is important is “operational knowledge” of the standards and principles of good thinking (Bailin et al. 1999b: 291–293). But the development of such critical thinking abilities as designing an experiment or constructing an operational definition can benefit from learning their underlying theory. Further, explicit knowledge of quirks of human thinking seems useful as a cautionary guide. Human memory is not just fallible about details, as people learn from their own experiences of misremembering, but is so malleable that a detailed, clear and vivid recollection of an event can be a total fabrication (Loftus 2017). People seek or interpret evidence in ways that are partial to their existing beliefs and expectations, often unconscious of their “confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998). Not only are people subject to this and other cognitive biases (Kahneman 2011), of which they are typically unaware, but it may be counter-productive for one to make oneself aware of them and try consciously to counteract them or to counteract social biases such as racial or sexual stereotypes (Kenyon & Beaulac 2014). It is helpful to be aware of these facts and of the superior effectiveness of blocking the operation of biases—for example, by making an immediate record of one’s observations, refraining from forming a preliminary explanatory hypothesis, blind refereeing, double-blind randomized trials, and blind grading of students’ work. It is also helpful to be aware of the prevalence of “noise” (unwanted unsystematic variability of judgments), of how to detect noise (through a noise audit), and of how to reduce noise: make accuracy the goal, think statistically, break a process of arriving at a judgment into independent tasks, resist premature intuitions, in a group get independent judgments first, favour comparative judgments and scales (Kahneman, Sibony, & Sunstein 2021). It is helpful as well to be aware of the concept of “bounded rationality” in decision-making and of the related distinction between “satisficing” and optimizing (Simon 1956; Gigerenzer 2001).

Critical thinking about an issue requires substantive knowledge of the domain to which the issue belongs. Critical thinking abilities are not a magic elixir that can be applied to any issue whatever by somebody who has no knowledge of the facts relevant to exploring that issue. For example, the student in Bubbles needed to know that gases do not penetrate solid objects like a glass, that air expands when heated, that the volume of an enclosed gas varies directly with its temperature and inversely with its pressure, and that hot objects will spontaneously cool down to the ambient temperature of their surroundings unless kept hot by insulation or a source of heat. Critical thinkers thus need a rich fund of subject-matter knowledge relevant to the variety of situations they encounter. This fact is recognized in the inclusion among critical thinking dispositions of a concern to become and remain generally well informed.

Experimental educational interventions, with control groups, have shown that education can improve critical thinking skills and dispositions, as measured by standardized tests. For information about these tests, see the Supplement on Assessment .

What educational methods are most effective at developing the dispositions, abilities and knowledge of a critical thinker? In a comprehensive meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies of strategies for teaching students to think critically, Abrami et al. (2015) found that dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring each increased the effectiveness of the educational intervention, and that they were most effective when combined. They also found that in these studies a combination of separate instruction in critical thinking with subject-matter instruction in which students are encouraged to think critically was more effective than either by itself. However, the difference was not statistically significant; that is, it might have arisen by chance.

Most of these studies lack the longitudinal follow-up required to determine whether the observed differential improvements in critical thinking abilities or dispositions continue over time, for example until high school or college graduation. For details on studies of methods of developing critical thinking skills and dispositions, see the Supplement on Educational Methods .

12. Controversies

Scholars have denied the generalizability of critical thinking abilities across subject domains, have alleged bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, and have investigated the relationship of critical thinking to other kinds of thinking.

McPeck (1981) attacked the thinking skills movement of the 1970s, including the critical thinking movement. He argued that there are no general thinking skills, since thinking is always thinking about some subject-matter. It is futile, he claimed, for schools and colleges to teach thinking as if it were a separate subject. Rather, teachers should lead their pupils to become autonomous thinkers by teaching school subjects in a way that brings out their cognitive structure and that encourages and rewards discussion and argument. As some of his critics (e.g., Paul 1985; Siegel 1985) pointed out, McPeck’s central argument needs elaboration, since it has obvious counter-examples in writing and speaking, for which (up to a certain level of complexity) there are teachable general abilities even though they are always about some subject-matter. To make his argument convincing, McPeck needs to explain how thinking differs from writing and speaking in a way that does not permit useful abstraction of its components from the subject-matters with which it deals. He has not done so. Nevertheless, his position that the dispositions and abilities of a critical thinker are best developed in the context of subject-matter instruction is shared by many theorists of critical thinking, including Dewey (1910, 1933), Glaser (1941), Passmore (1980), Weinstein (1990), Bailin et al. (1999b), and Willingham (2019).

McPeck’s challenge prompted reflection on the extent to which critical thinking is subject-specific. McPeck argued for a strong subject-specificity thesis, according to which it is a conceptual truth that all critical thinking abilities are specific to a subject. (He did not however extend his subject-specificity thesis to critical thinking dispositions. In particular, he took the disposition to suspend judgment in situations of cognitive dissonance to be a general disposition.) Conceptual subject-specificity is subject to obvious counter-examples, such as the general ability to recognize confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions. A more modest thesis, also endorsed by McPeck, is epistemological subject-specificity, according to which the norms of good thinking vary from one field to another. Epistemological subject-specificity clearly holds to a certain extent; for example, the principles in accordance with which one solves a differential equation are quite different from the principles in accordance with which one determines whether a painting is a genuine Picasso. But the thesis suffers, as Ennis (1989) points out, from vagueness of the concept of a field or subject and from the obvious existence of inter-field principles, however broadly the concept of a field is construed. For example, the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning hold for all the varied fields in which such reasoning occurs. A third kind of subject-specificity is empirical subject-specificity, according to which as a matter of empirically observable fact a person with the abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker in one area of investigation will not necessarily have them in another area of investigation.

The thesis of empirical subject-specificity raises the general problem of transfer. If critical thinking abilities and dispositions have to be developed independently in each school subject, how are they of any use in dealing with the problems of everyday life and the political and social issues of contemporary society, most of which do not fit into the framework of a traditional school subject? Proponents of empirical subject-specificity tend to argue that transfer is more likely to occur if there is critical thinking instruction in a variety of domains, with explicit attention to dispositions and abilities that cut across domains. But evidence for this claim is scanty. There is a need for well-designed empirical studies that investigate the conditions that make transfer more likely.

It is common ground in debates about the generality or subject-specificity of critical thinking dispositions and abilities that critical thinking about any topic requires background knowledge about the topic. For example, the most sophisticated understanding of the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning is of no help unless accompanied by some knowledge of what might be plausible explanations of some phenomenon under investigation.

Critics have objected to bias in the theory, pedagogy and practice of critical thinking. Commentators (e.g., Alston 1995; Ennis 1998) have noted that anyone who takes a position has a bias in the neutral sense of being inclined in one direction rather than others. The critics, however, are objecting to bias in the pejorative sense of an unjustified favoring of certain ways of knowing over others, frequently alleging that the unjustly favoured ways are those of a dominant sex or culture (Bailin 1995). These ways favour:

• reinforcement of egocentric and sociocentric biases over dialectical engagement with opposing world-views (Paul 1981, 1984; Warren 1998)
• distancing from the object of inquiry over closeness to it (Martin 1992; Thayer-Bacon 1992)
• indifference to the situation of others over care for them (Martin 1992)
• orientation to thought over orientation to action (Martin 1992)
• being reasonable over caring to understand people’s ideas (Thayer-Bacon 1993)
• being neutral and objective over being embodied and situated (Thayer-Bacon 1995a)
• doubting over believing (Thayer-Bacon 1995b)
• reason over emotion, imagination and intuition (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
• solitary thinking over collaborative thinking (Thayer-Bacon 2000)
• written and spoken assignments over other forms of expression (Alston 2001)
• attention to written and spoken communications over attention to human problems (Alston 2001)
• winning debates in the public sphere over making and understanding meaning (Alston 2001)

A common thread in this smorgasbord of accusations is dissatisfaction with focusing on the logical analysis and evaluation of reasoning and arguments. While these authors acknowledge that such analysis and evaluation is part of critical thinking and should be part of its conceptualization and pedagogy, they insist that it is only a part. Paul (1981), for example, bemoans the tendency of atomistic teaching of methods of analyzing and evaluating arguments to turn students into more able sophists, adept at finding fault with positions and arguments with which they disagree but even more entrenched in the egocentric and sociocentric biases with which they began. Martin (1992) and Thayer-Bacon (1992) cite with approval the self-reported intimacy with their subject-matter of leading researchers in biology and medicine, an intimacy that conflicts with the distancing allegedly recommended in standard conceptions and pedagogy of critical thinking. Thayer-Bacon (2000) contrasts the embodied and socially embedded learning of her elementary school students in a Montessori school, who used their imagination, intuition and emotions as well as their reason, with conceptions of critical thinking as

thinking that is used to critique arguments, offer justifications, and make judgments about what are the good reasons, or the right answers. (Thayer-Bacon 2000: 127–128)

Alston (2001) reports that her students in a women’s studies class were able to see the flaws in the Cinderella myth that pervades much romantic fiction but in their own romantic relationships still acted as if all failures were the woman’s fault and still accepted the notions of love at first sight and living happily ever after. Students, she writes, should

be able to connect their intellectual critique to a more affective, somatic, and ethical account of making risky choices that have sexist, racist, classist, familial, sexual, or other consequences for themselves and those both near and far… critical thinking that reads arguments, texts, or practices merely on the surface without connections to feeling/desiring/doing or action lacks an ethical depth that should infuse the difference between mere cognitive activity and something we want to call critical thinking. (Alston 2001: 34)

Some critics portray such biases as unfair to women. Thayer-Bacon (1992), for example, has charged modern critical thinking theory with being sexist, on the ground that it separates the self from the object and causes one to lose touch with one’s inner voice, and thus stigmatizes women, who (she asserts) link self to object and listen to their inner voice. Her charge does not imply that women as a group are on average less able than men to analyze and evaluate arguments. Facione (1990c) found no difference by sex in performance on his California Critical Thinking Skills Test. Kuhn (1991: 280–281) found no difference by sex in either the disposition or the competence to engage in argumentative thinking.

The critics propose a variety of remedies for the biases that they allege. In general, they do not propose to eliminate or downplay critical thinking as an educational goal. Rather, they propose to conceptualize critical thinking differently and to change its pedagogy accordingly. Their pedagogical proposals arise logically from their objections. They can be summarized as follows:

• Focus on argument networks with dialectical exchanges reflecting contesting points of view rather than on atomic arguments, so as to develop “strong sense” critical thinking that transcends egocentric and sociocentric biases (Paul 1981, 1984).
• Foster closeness to the subject-matter and feeling connected to others in order to inform a humane democracy (Martin 1992).
• Develop “constructive thinking” as a social activity in a community of physically embodied and socially embedded inquirers with personal voices who value not only reason but also imagination, intuition and emotion (Thayer-Bacon 2000).
• In developing critical thinking in school subjects, treat as important neither skills nor dispositions but opening worlds of meaning (Alston 2001).
• Attend to the development of critical thinking dispositions as well as skills, and adopt the “critical pedagogy” practised and advocated by Freire (1968 [1970]) and hooks (1994) (Dalgleish, Girard, & Davies 2017).

A common thread in these proposals is treatment of critical thinking as a social, interactive, personally engaged activity like that of a quilting bee or a barn-raising (Thayer-Bacon 2000) rather than as an individual, solitary, distanced activity symbolized by Rodin’s The Thinker . One can get a vivid description of education with the former type of goal from the writings of bell hooks (1994, 2010). Critical thinking for her is open-minded dialectical exchange across opposing standpoints and from multiple perspectives, a conception similar to Paul’s “strong sense” critical thinking (Paul 1981). She abandons the structure of domination in the traditional classroom. In an introductory course on black women writers, for example, she assigns students to write an autobiographical paragraph about an early racial memory, then to read it aloud as the others listen, thus affirming the uniqueness and value of each voice and creating a communal awareness of the diversity of the group’s experiences (hooks 1994: 84). Her “engaged pedagogy” is thus similar to the “freedom under guidance” implemented in John Dewey’s Laboratory School of Chicago in the late 1890s and early 1900s. It incorporates the dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring that Abrami (2015) found to be most effective in improving critical thinking skills and dispositions.

What is the relationship of critical thinking to problem solving, decision-making, higher-order thinking, creative thinking, and other recognized types of thinking? One’s answer to this question obviously depends on how one defines the terms used in the question. If critical thinking is conceived broadly to cover any careful thinking about any topic for any purpose, then problem solving and decision making will be kinds of critical thinking, if they are done carefully. Historically, ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving’ were two names for the same thing. If critical thinking is conceived more narrowly as consisting solely of appraisal of intellectual products, then it will be disjoint with problem solving and decision making, which are constructive.

Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives used the phrase “intellectual abilities and skills” for what had been labeled “critical thinking” by some, “reflective thinking” by Dewey and others, and “problem solving” by still others (Bloom et al. 1956: 38). Thus, the so-called “higher-order thinking skills” at the taxonomy’s top levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation are just critical thinking skills, although they do not come with general criteria for their assessment (Ennis 1981b). The revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson et al. 2001) likewise treats critical thinking as cutting across those types of cognitive process that involve more than remembering (Anderson et al. 2001: 269–270). For details, see the Supplement on History .

As to creative thinking, it overlaps with critical thinking (Bailin 1987, 1988). Thinking about the explanation of some phenomenon or event, as in Ferryboat , requires creative imagination in constructing plausible explanatory hypotheses. Likewise, thinking about a policy question, as in Candidate , requires creativity in coming up with options. Conversely, creativity in any field needs to be balanced by critical appraisal of the draft painting or novel or mathematical theory.

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• Turri, John, Mark Alfano, and John Greco, 2017, “Virtue Epistemology”, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition). URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/epistemology-virtue/ >
• Vincent-Lancrin, Stéphan, Carlos González-Sancho, Mathias Bouckaert, Federico de Luca, Meritxell Fernández-Barrerra, Gwénaël Jacotin, Joaquin Urgel, and Quentin Vidal, 2019, Fostering Students’ Creativity and Critical Thinking: What It Means in School. Educational Research and Innovation , Paris: OECD Publishing.
• Warren, Karen J. 1988. “Critical Thinking and Feminism”, Informal Logic , 10(1): 31–44. [ Warren 1988 available online ]
• Watson, Goodwin, and Edward M. Glaser, 1980a, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, Form A , San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.
• –––, 1980b, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal: Forms A and B; Manual , San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation,
• –––, 1994, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, Form B , San Antonio, TX: Psychological Corporation.
• Weinstein, Mark, 1990, “Towards a Research Agenda for Informal Logic and Critical Thinking”, Informal Logic , 12(3): 121–143. [ Weinstein 1990 available online ]
• –––, 2013, Logic, Truth and Inquiry , London: College Publications.
• Willingham, Daniel T., 2019, “How to Teach Critical Thinking”, Education: Future Frontiers , 1: 1–17. [Available online at https://prod65.education.nsw.gov.au/content/dam/main-education/teaching-and-learning/education-for-a-changing-world/media/documents/How-to-teach-critical-thinking-Willingham.pdf.]
• Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus, 1996, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139174763

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Critical Thinking Definition, Skills, and Examples

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Critical thinking refers to the ability to analyze information objectively and make a reasoned judgment. It involves the evaluation of sources, such as data, facts, observable phenomena, and research findings.

Good critical thinkers can draw reasonable conclusions from a set of information, and discriminate between useful and less useful details to solve problems or make decisions. Employers prioritize the ability to think critically—find out why, plus see how you can demonstrate that you have this ability throughout the job application process. 

Why Do Employers Value Critical Thinking Skills?

Employers want job candidates who can evaluate a situation using logical thought and offer the best solution.

 Someone with critical thinking skills can be trusted to make decisions independently, and will not need constant handholding.

Hiring a critical thinker means that micromanaging won't be required. Critical thinking abilities are among the most sought-after skills in almost every industry and workplace. You can demonstrate critical thinking by using related keywords in your resume and cover letter, and during your interview.

Examples of Critical Thinking

The circumstances that demand critical thinking vary from industry to industry. Some examples include:

• A triage nurse analyzes the cases at hand and decides the order by which the patients should be treated.
• A plumber evaluates the materials that would best suit a particular job.
• An attorney reviews evidence and devises a strategy to win a case or to decide whether to settle out of court.
• A manager analyzes customer feedback forms and uses this information to develop a customer service training session for employees.

Promote Your Skills in Your Job Search

If critical thinking is a key phrase in the job listings you are applying for, be sure to emphasize your critical thinking skills throughout your job search.

Add Keywords to Your Resume

You can use critical thinking keywords (analytical, problem solving, creativity, etc.) in your resume. When describing your  work history , include top critical thinking skills that accurately describe you. You can also include them in your  resume summary , if you have one.

For example, your summary might read, “Marketing Associate with five years of experience in project management. Skilled in conducting thorough market research and competitor analysis to assess market trends and client needs, and to develop appropriate acquisition tactics.”

Mention Skills in Your Cover Letter

Include these critical thinking skills in your cover letter. In the body of your letter, mention one or two of these skills, and give specific examples of times when you have demonstrated them at work. Think about times when you had to analyze or evaluate materials to solve a problem.

Show the Interviewer Your Skills

You can use these skill words in an interview. Discuss a time when you were faced with a particular problem or challenge at work and explain how you applied critical thinking to solve it.

Some interviewers will give you a hypothetical scenario or problem, and ask you to use critical thinking skills to solve it. In this case, explain your thought process thoroughly to the interviewer. He or she is typically more focused on how you arrive at your solution rather than the solution itself. The interviewer wants to see you analyze and evaluate (key parts of critical thinking) the given scenario or problem.

Of course, each job will require different skills and experiences, so make sure you read the job description carefully and focus on the skills listed by the employer.

Top Critical Thinking Skills

Keep these in-demand critical thinking skills in mind as you update your resume and write your cover letter. As you've seen, you can also emphasize them at other points throughout the application process, such as your interview. 

Part of critical thinking is the ability to carefully examine something, whether it is a problem, a set of data, or a text. People with  analytical skills  can examine information, understand what it means, and properly explain to others the implications of that information.

• Asking Thoughtful Questions
• Data Analysis
• Interpretation
• Questioning Evidence
• Recognizing Patterns

Communication

Often, you will need to share your conclusions with your employers or with a group of colleagues. You need to be able to  communicate with others  to share your ideas effectively. You might also need to engage in critical thinking in a group. In this case, you will need to work with others and communicate effectively to figure out solutions to complex problems.

• Active Listening
• Collaboration
• Explanation
• Interpersonal
• Presentation
• Verbal Communication
• Written Communication

Critical thinking often involves creativity and innovation. You might need to spot patterns in the information you are looking at or come up with a solution that no one else has thought of before. All of this involves a creative eye that can take a different approach from all other approaches.

• Flexibility
• Conceptualization
• Imagination
• Drawing Connections
• Synthesizing

Open-Mindedness

To think critically, you need to be able to put aside any assumptions or judgments and merely analyze the information you receive. You need to be objective, evaluating ideas without bias.

• Objectivity
• Observation

Problem Solving

Problem-solving is another critical thinking skill that involves analyzing a problem, generating and implementing a solution, and assessing the success of the plan. Employers don’t simply want employees who can think about information critically. They also need to be able to come up with practical solutions.

• Attention to Detail
• Clarification
• Decision Making
• Groundedness
• Identifying Patterns

More Critical Thinking Skills

• Inductive Reasoning
• Deductive Reasoning
• Noticing Outliers
• Adaptability
• Emotional Intelligence
• Brainstorming
• Optimization
• Restructuring
• Integration
• Strategic Planning
• Project Management
• Ongoing Improvement
• Causal Relationships
• Case Analysis
• Diagnostics
• SWOT Analysis
• Business Intelligence
• Quantitative Data Management
• Qualitative Data Management
• Risk Management
• Scientific Method
• Consumer Behavior

Key Takeaways

• Demonstrate that you have critical thinking skills by adding relevant keywords to your resume.
• Mention pertinent critical thinking skills in your cover letter, too, and include an example of a time when you demonstrated them at work.
• Finally, highlight critical thinking skills during your interview. For instance, you might discuss a time when you were faced with a challenge at work and explain how you applied critical thinking skills to solve it.

University of Louisville. " What is Critical Thinking ."

American Management Association. " AMA Critical Skills Survey: Workers Need Higher Level Skills to Succeed in the 21st Century ."

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What is the role of communication in critical thinking  .

Communication is the framework, foundation, and skeletal structure of critical thinking. People who continually strive to  improve their critical thinking skills  are better communicators.

Critical thinkers have communication skills that:

• help them to articulate and visualize problems and solutions from different angles
• enable them to present their perspectives with confidence
• assimilate and organize their thoughts through logical analysis

In today’s job market, communication ability based on critical thinking are valued traits in new employees—and according to one 2016 survey by the Harvard Business Review—those skills are  sadly lacking  in many of today’s job applicants.

The Ultimate Guide To Critical Thinking

• Is Critical Thinking A Soft Skill Or Hard Skill?
• How To Improve Critical Thinking Skills At Work And Make Better Decisions
• 5 Creative and Critical Thinking Examples In Workplace
• 10 Best Books On Critical Thinking And Problem Solving
• 12 Common Barriers To Critical Thinking (And How To Overcome Them)

How To Promote Critical Thinking In The Workplace

• Critical Thinking vs Problem Solving: What’s the Difference?

Table of Contents

Examples of communication in critical thinking

There are a variety of ways to communicate effectively using critical thinking. Indeed.com highlights  four types of communication  in critical thinking with suggestions on deploying those communication tools:

1.  Verbal —Critical thinkers use a strong and confident speaking voice as well as active listening—a conscious effort to not only hear the words, but the complete message the other person is communicating. They avoid “filler” words and fluff, as well as excessive industry jargon when plain speaking will do.

2.  Visual —Good visual communications are governed by the following rules of thumb:

• get permission in advance
• only use visual presentations when they add value to the process
• consider the audience
• present clear and easy-to-understand visual presentations  focusing on the core message

3.  Written —Good writers strive for simplicity and prefer active voice. They never rely on tone and always thoroughly review what they have written. They keep a file of their own and the writing of others that they find effective and appealing to their writing style.

4.  Nonverbal —At the core of critical thinking is controlling emotions and self-monitoring. A critical thinker communicates intentionally and uses appropriate facial expressions and body knowledge to reinforce objectivity.

Nonverbal communication is especially effective when it is backed up with solid research and evidence, with appropriate nonverbal messaging that projects a relaxed, confident persona.

How language or communication influences your critical thinking

So, all the above communication methods contribute a unique perspective to what is the role of communication in critical thinking. Also, effective communication influences your critical thinking in several positive ways:

Critical thinking communication skills help you to stay on point

Staying on topic and avoiding deviating is a byproduct of critical thinking. In group settings, it can be difficult to fix a problem when others have their own views and possible hidden agendas. A skilled communicator can stay on track and focus on core issues, while establishing trust and a reputation for staying on point.

Critical thinkers have a curious mind and are in control of their emotions.

An essential feature of critical thinking is self-knowledge and an ability to shed biases and to control emotions. Employers seek this quality and value an employee who can regulate emotions as well as ask questions for useful solutions to difficult problems.

A caveat about emotions

David R. Novak  sees communication as a difficult process and argues that “critical thinking isn’t a purely rational process.” He is wary of anyone “trumpeting their ‘rationality,’ arguing that “their humanity has likely been corrupted.” In fact, dealing with emotions is “part of the process of communicating and part of critical thinking.”

Says Novak, “Emotions are real and powerful.” They can sometimes be central when hashing out difficult problems with people. His advice when dealing with emotion-driven problems is to “embrace and express authentic emotions appropriately.”

Finally, the thing about emotive expressions is that they “are evidence of systemic problems that lie beneath.” Novak’s advice: “Strive to be flexible to and open to the authentic expressions of others. You can’t tell people in pain to suppress emotions.”

What is the role of communication in critical thinking when evaluating applicants for management positions?

It is a given that when managers make a decision, they must share it both up and down the chain of their hierarchies. Managers who are critical thinkers demonstrate sophisticated communication skills. They provide supporting arguments and the necessary evidence to substantiate their decision. When their team is on the same page, they play by the same rules.

Critical thinking improves communication

When a manager thinks clearly and is not unduly swayed by bias, what follows is a more productive communication process. That process consists of better engagement where everyone can contribute to the mission.

Better communication through critical thinking is a stepping stone to emotional intelligence

Analytical rationality and  emotional intelligence  can coexist. In fact, a manager with well-developed critical thinking and communication skills can avoid emotion-driven decisions. However, their respect for the emotional and ethical implications of any problem or challenge enables them to come up with more  creative solutions.

Critical thinkers communicate with challenging open-ended questions

Managers who are critical thinkers actively encourage creativity. They are open to new ideas and their goal is, by effective communication, to amass a larger trove of information when facing decisions.

This communication habit, in turn, promotes even more creative solutions through asking challenging and open-ended questions from those who have a stake in the solution. When those open-ended questions are loaded with elements of critical thinking—e.g., “How do you know that? What evidence do you have?”—the manager is teaching everyone the value of critical thinking and communication.

Critical thinking plus good communication equal savings in time and money.

Managers who encourage critical thinking in the workplace minimize the requirement for supervision. They can catch problems early, and encourage initiative and independence. Managers can then focus on the core responsibilities of their duties and save their organization time and resources.

Let’s Recap

Communication is the foundation of critical thinking. Critical thinkers have communication skills that get to the heart of problems. Examples of communication resources in critical thinking include verbal, visual, written, and nonverbal skills. Each has its own value and applications in critical thinking.

Language or communication influences critical thinking effectiveness by helping you to stay on point and in control of your emotions. Emotions, however, can come into play in effectively communicating with those whose emotions have taken over.

Managers who are critical thinkers can develop communication styles that encourage their team to communicate better and play by the same rules. A manager who thinks and communicates clearly can promote better communications and a team that contributes to the mission.

When the goal is a creative solution to a difficult challenge, a manager who asks the right open-ended questions can tap into everyone’s innate desire to solve problems.

Finally, managers who encourage effective communication and critical thinking minimize the need for supervising their employees, while encouraging initiative and independence. That translates into savings in time, effort, and money.

• Is Critical Thinking Overrated?  Disadvantages Of Critical Thinking
• 15 Signs Of Poor Communication Skills And How To Fix Them   
• 25 In-Demand Jobs That Require Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving Skills
• Brainstorming: Techniques Used To Boost Critical Thinking and Creativity
• 11 Principles Of Critical Thinking  
• Difference Between Public Speaking And Interpersonal Communication

Jenny Palmer

Founder of Eggcellentwork.com. With over 20 years of experience in HR and various roles in corporate world, Jenny shares tips and advice to help professionals advance in their careers. Her blog is a go-to resource for anyone looking to improve their skills, land their dream job, or make a career change.

Further Reading...

5 Creative and Critical Thinking Examples In Workplace  

Brainstorming: Techniques Used To Boost Critical Thinking and Creativity  

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Critical Thinking vs Problem Solving: What's the Difference?

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What Is the Connection between Communication and Critical Thinking?

Communication and critical thinking are connected in many important ways. On a basic level, the ability to think critically, reason through a problem, and develop a cogent argument or explanation is important for all types of daily communication. People with the capability to really think about an issue and see it from a different perspective will then most likely be better communicators, and be less likely to react quickly in anger. On another level, critical thinkers often examine the way other people are thinking and making their arguments before they choose to respond themselves. This type of analysis is another very important aspect of the connection of communication to critical thinking.

In many cases, problems with communication are based on an inability to think critically about a situation, and see it from different perspectives. Communication and critical thinking are linked in this way because people who do possess the ability to problem-solve and consider other perspectives tend to be better communicators than those who do not. Though this is important for friendly argument and debate, it is also beneficial for all different types of communication, including workplace relationships, friendships, and romantic relationships. Despite this, many people are never taught the positive link between communication and critical thinking.

Another important link between communication and critical thinking is the ability to learn how to follow another person's thought process and line of reasoning. An individual who is able to think critically about how another person is making an argument will be able to formulate a more effective response, more quickly, than someone who is not. In certain practices such as law, this skill can be invaluable. Fortunately, it is something that can be learned and practiced, and is certainly a skill that can be improved over time; by the same token, however, it cannot be learned overnight, and must be developed with practice and experience..

In some situations, critical thinking ability improves communication in an indirect way. Someone who is interested in a certain topic, for instance, and has the ability to think and form questions about what he or she still needs to learn, will likely take steps to gain this knowledge. Increased knowledge and wisdom will always be beneficial in different types of communications with others. Regardless, recognizing the important links between communication and critical thinking skills is important for people of all ages and all professions; educators especially may want to bring some of this theory into their lesson plans in order to teach students not just how to solve problems, but how to be better communicators in the process.

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• What Is the Connection between Critical Thinking and Creativity?
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Discussion Comments

Post your comments.

• By: gstockstudio Good communicators are less likely to react in anger.
• By: Dmitry Goygel-Sokol Educators may want to bring communication and critical thinking theories into their lesson plans.
• By: Paolese Watching too much television may have a negative impact on an individual's critical thinking skills.

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What is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally, understanding the logical connection between ideas.  Critical thinking has been the subject of much debate and thought since the time of early Greek philosophers such as Plato and Socrates and has continued to be a subject of discussion into the modern age, for example the ability to recognise fake news .

Critical thinking might be described as the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking.

In essence, critical thinking requires you to use your ability to reason. It is about being an active learner rather than a passive recipient of information.

Critical thinkers rigorously question ideas and assumptions rather than accepting them at face value. They will always seek to determine whether the ideas, arguments and findings represent the entire picture and are open to finding that they do not.

Critical thinkers will identify, analyse and solve problems systematically rather than by intuition or instinct.

Someone with critical thinking skills can:

Understand the links between ideas.

Determine the importance and relevance of arguments and ideas.

Recognise, build and appraise arguments.

Identify inconsistencies and errors in reasoning.

Approach problems in a consistent and systematic way.

Reflect on the justification of their own assumptions, beliefs and values.

Critical thinking is thinking about things in certain ways so as to arrive at the best possible solution in the circumstances that the thinker is aware of. In more everyday language, it is a way of thinking about whatever is presently occupying your mind so that you come to the best possible conclusion.

Critical Thinking is:

A way of thinking about particular things at a particular time; it is not the accumulation of facts and knowledge or something that you can learn once and then use in that form forever, such as the nine times table you learn and use in school.

The Skills We Need for Critical Thinking

The skills that we need in order to be able to think critically are varied and include observation, analysis, interpretation, reflection, evaluation, inference, explanation, problem solving, and decision making.

Specifically we need to be able to:

Think about a topic or issue in an objective and critical way.

Identify the different arguments there are in relation to a particular issue.

Evaluate a point of view to determine how strong or valid it is.

Recognise any weaknesses or negative points that there are in the evidence or argument.

Notice what implications there might be behind a statement or argument.

Provide structured reasoning and support for an argument that we wish to make.

The Critical Thinking Process

You should be aware that none of us think critically all the time.

Sometimes we think in almost any way but critically, for example when our self-control is affected by anger, grief or joy or when we are feeling just plain ‘bloody minded’.

On the other hand, the good news is that, since our critical thinking ability varies according to our current mindset, most of the time we can learn to improve our critical thinking ability by developing certain routine activities and applying them to all problems that present themselves.

Once you understand the theory of critical thinking, improving your critical thinking skills takes persistence and practice.

Try this simple exercise to help you to start thinking critically.

Think of something that someone has recently told you. Then ask yourself the following questions:

Who said it?

Someone you know? Someone in a position of authority or power? Does it matter who told you this?

What did they say?

Did they give facts or opinions? Did they provide all the facts? Did they leave anything out?

Where did they say it?

Was it in public or in private? Did other people have a chance to respond an provide an alternative account?

When did they say it?

Was it before, during or after an important event? Is timing important?

Why did they say it?

Did they explain the reasoning behind their opinion? Were they trying to make someone look good or bad?

How did they say it?

Were they happy or sad, angry or indifferent? Did they write it or say it? Could you understand what was said?

What are you Aiming to Achieve?

One of the most important aspects of critical thinking is to decide what you are aiming to achieve and then make a decision based on a range of possibilities.

Once you have clarified that aim for yourself you should use it as the starting point in all future situations requiring thought and, possibly, further decision making. Where needed, make your workmates, family or those around you aware of your intention to pursue this goal. You must then discipline yourself to keep on track until changing circumstances mean you have to revisit the start of the decision making process.

However, there are things that get in the way of simple decision making. We all carry with us a range of likes and dislikes, learnt behaviours and personal preferences developed throughout our lives; they are the hallmarks of being human. A major contribution to ensuring we think critically is to be aware of these personal characteristics, preferences and biases and make allowance for them when considering possible next steps, whether they are at the pre-action consideration stage or as part of a rethink caused by unexpected or unforeseen impediments to continued progress.

The more clearly we are aware of ourselves, our strengths and weaknesses, the more likely our critical thinking will be productive.

The Benefit of Foresight

Perhaps the most important element of thinking critically is foresight.

Almost all decisions we make and implement don’t prove disastrous if we find reasons to abandon them. However, our decision making will be infinitely better and more likely to lead to success if, when we reach a tentative conclusion, we pause and consider the impact on the people and activities around us.

The elements needing consideration are generally numerous and varied. In many cases, consideration of one element from a different perspective will reveal potential dangers in pursuing our decision.

For instance, moving a business activity to a new location may improve potential output considerably but it may also lead to the loss of skilled workers if the distance moved is too great. Which of these is the more important consideration? Is there some way of lessening the conflict?

These are the sort of problems that may arise from incomplete critical thinking, a demonstration perhaps of the critical importance of good critical thinking.

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In Summary:

Critical thinking is aimed at achieving the best possible outcomes in any situation. In order to achieve this it must involve gathering and evaluating information from as many different sources possible.

Critical thinking requires a clear, often uncomfortable, assessment of your personal strengths, weaknesses and preferences and their possible impact on decisions you may make.

Critical thinking requires the development and use of foresight as far as this is possible. As Doris Day sang, “the future’s not ours to see”.

Implementing the decisions made arising from critical thinking must take into account an assessment of possible outcomes and ways of avoiding potentially negative outcomes, or at least lessening their impact.

• Critical thinking involves reviewing the results of the application of decisions made and implementing change where possible.

It might be thought that we are overextending our demands on critical thinking in expecting that it can help to construct focused meaning rather than examining the information given and the knowledge we have acquired to see if we can, if necessary, construct a meaning that will be acceptable and useful.

After all, almost no information we have available to us, either externally or internally, carries any guarantee of its life or appropriateness.  Neat step-by-step instructions may provide some sort of trellis on which our basic understanding of critical thinking can blossom but it doesn’t and cannot provide any assurance of certainty, utility or longevity.

Continue to: Critical Thinking and Fake News Critical Reading

See also: Analytical Skills Understanding and Addressing Conspiracy Theories Introduction to Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)

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• What is Critical Thinking?

The ability to think critically calls for a higher-order thinking than simply the ability to recall information.

Definitions of critical thinking, its elements, and its associated activities fill the educational literature of the past forty years. Critical thinking has been described as an ability to question; to acknowledge and test previously held assumptions; to recognize ambiguity; to examine, interpret, evaluate, reason, and reflect; to make informed judgments and decisions; and to clarify, articulate, and justify positions (Hullfish & Smith, 1961; Ennis, 1962; Ruggiero, 1975; Scriven, 1976; Hallet, 1984; Kitchener, 1986; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991; Mines et al., 1990; Halpern, 1996; Paul & Elder, 2001; Petress, 2004; Holyoak & Morrison, 2005; among others).

After a careful review of the mountainous body of literature defining critical thinking and its elements, UofL has chosen to adopt the language of Michael Scriven and Richard Paul (2003) as a comprehensive, concise operating definition:

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.

Paul and Scriven go on to suggest that critical thinking is based on: "universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness. It entails the examination of those structures or elements of thought implicit in all reasoning: purpose, problem, or question-at-issue, assumptions, concepts, empirical grounding; reasoning leading to conclusions, implication and consequences, objections from alternative viewpoints, and frame of reference. Critical thinking - in being responsive to variable subject matter, issues, and purposes - is incorporated in a family of interwoven modes of thinking, among them: scientific thinking, mathematical thinking, historical thinking, anthropological thinking, economic thinking, moral thinking, and philosophical thinking."

This conceptualization of critical thinking has been refined and developed further by Richard Paul and Linder Elder into the Paul-Elder framework of critical thinking. Currently, this approach is one of the most widely published and cited frameworks in the critical thinking literature. According to the Paul-Elder framework, critical thinking is the:

• Analysis of thinking by focusing on the parts or structures of thinking ("the Elements of Thought")
• Evaluation of thinking by focusing on the quality ("the Universal Intellectual Standards")
• Improvement of thinking by using what you have learned ("the Intellectual Traits")

Selection of a Critical Thinking Framework

The University of Louisville chose the Paul-Elder model of Critical Thinking as the approach to guide our efforts in developing and enhancing our critical thinking curriculum. The Paul-Elder framework was selected based on criteria adapted from the characteristics of a good model of critical thinking developed at Surry Community College. The Paul-Elder critical thinking framework is comprehensive, uses discipline-neutral terminology, is applicable to all disciplines, defines specific cognitive skills including metacognition, and offers high quality resources.

Why the selection of a single critical thinking framework?

The use of a single critical thinking framework is an important aspect of institution-wide critical thinking initiatives (Paul and Nosich, 1993; Paul, 2004). According to this view, critical thinking instruction should not be relegated to one or two disciplines or departments with discipline specific language and conceptualizations. Rather, critical thinking instruction should be explicitly infused in all courses so that critical thinking skills can be developed and reinforced in student learning across the curriculum. The use of a common approach with a common language allows for a central organizer and for the development of critical thinking skill sets in all courses.

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Critical Thinking and Decision-Making  - What is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking and decision-making  -, what is critical thinking, critical thinking and decision-making what is critical thinking.

Critical Thinking and Decision-Making: What is Critical Thinking?

Lesson 1: what is critical thinking, what is critical thinking.

Critical thinking is a term that gets thrown around a lot. You've probably heard it used often throughout the years whether it was in school, at work, or in everyday conversation. But when you stop to think about it, what exactly is critical thinking and how do you do it ?

Watch the video below to learn more about critical thinking.

Simply put, critical thinking is the act of deliberately analyzing information so that you can make better judgements and decisions . It involves using things like logic, reasoning, and creativity, to draw conclusions and generally understand things better.

This may sound like a pretty broad definition, and that's because critical thinking is a broad skill that can be applied to so many different situations. You can use it to prepare for a job interview, manage your time better, make decisions about purchasing things, and so much more.

The process

As humans, we are constantly thinking . It's something we can't turn off. But not all of it is critical thinking. No one thinks critically 100% of the time... that would be pretty exhausting! Instead, it's an intentional process , something that we consciously use when we're presented with difficult problems or important decisions.

Improving your critical thinking

In order to become a better critical thinker, it's important to ask questions when you're presented with a problem or decision, before jumping to any conclusions. You can start with simple ones like What do I currently know? and How do I know this? These can help to give you a better idea of what you're working with and, in some cases, simplify more complex issues.  

Real-world applications

Let's take a look at how we can use critical thinking to evaluate online information . Say a friend of yours posts a news article on social media and you're drawn to its headline. If you were to use your everyday automatic thinking, you might accept it as fact and move on. But if you were thinking critically, you would first analyze the available information and ask some questions :

• What's the source of this article?
• Is the headline potentially misleading?
• What are my friend's general beliefs?
• Do their beliefs inform why they might have shared this?

After analyzing all of this information, you can draw a conclusion about whether or not you think the article is trustworthy.

Critical thinking has a wide range of real-world applications . It can help you to make better decisions, become more hireable, and generally better understand the world around you.

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Article contents

Post-truth and critical communication studies.

• Jayson Harsin Jayson Harsin Department of Global Communication, American University of Paris
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.757
• Published online: 20 December 2018

While the periodizing concept “post-truth” (PT) initially appeared in the United States as a key word of popular politics in the form “post-truth politics” or “post-truth society,” it quickly appeared in many languages. It is now the object of increasing scholarly attention and public debate. Its popular and academic treatments sometimes differ in respect to its meaning, but most associate it with communication forms such as fake or false news, rumors, hoaxes, and political lying. They also identify causes such as polarization and unethical politicians or unregulated social media; shoddy journalism; or simply the inevitable chaos ushered in by digital media technologies. PT is sometimes posited as a social and political condition whereby citizens or audiences and politicians no longer respect truth (e.g., climate science deniers or “birthers”) but simply accept as true what they believe or feel. However, more rigorously, PT is actually a breakdown of social trust, which encompasses what was formerly the major institutional truth-teller or publicist—the news media. What is accepted as popular truth is really a weak form of knowledge, opinion based on trust in those who supposedly know. Critical communication approaches locate its historical legacy in the earliest forms of political persuasion and questions of ethics and epistemology, such as those raised by Plato in the Gorgias . While there are timeless similarities, PT is a 21st-century phenomenon. It is not “after” truth but after a historical period where interlocking elite institutions were discoverers, producers, and gatekeepers of truth, accepted by social trust (the church, science, governments, the school, etc.). Critical scholars have identified a more complex historical set of factors, to which popular proposed solutions have been mostly blind. Modern origins of PT lie in the anxious elite negotiation of mass representative liberal democracy with proposals for organizing and deploying mass communication technologies. These elites consisted of pioneers in the influence or persuasion industries, closely associated with government and political practice and funding, and university research. These influence industries were increasingly accepted not just by business but also by (resource-rich) professional political actors. Their object was not policy education and argument to constituents but, increasingly strategically, emotion and attention management. PT can usefully be understood in the context of its historical emergence, through its popular forms and responses, such as rumors, conspiracies, hoaxes, fake news, fact-checking, and filter bubbles, as well as through its multiple effects—not the least of which the discourse of panic about it.

• fact-checking
• disinformation
• attention economy
• political communication
• communication and critical studies

Post-truth (PT) is a periodizing concept (Green, 1995 ; Besserman, 1998 ) that refers to a historically particular public anxiety about public truth claims and authority to be a legitimate public truth-teller. However, the term is potentially misleading for at least two major reasons. First, it pertains to two different but related forms of truth: honesty, on the one hand, and factuality and knowledge (justified belief), on the other. Second, PT presents definitional problems similar to other grand periodizing concepts (e.g., modernity and modernism, postmodernity and postmodernism; industrial and postindustrial; traditional and post-traditional). It is sometimes interpreted as a time beyond, after or without truth, which could not be farther from the truth. Post-truth’s historical and cultural aspect related to shifting power relations and strategies make it an especially fertile subject for critical communication study.

How can PT be empirically known? It can be recognized in constant discursive obsession with and accusation of dishonesty, especially lying, and by the public anxiety and distrust it generates. It lies in the frequency and volume of the increasing amounts of labor to produce and attempt to debunk or clarify inaccurate or deceptive statements, the proliferation of “fact-checking” and rumor or hoax debunking organizations, usually individual businesses or wings of news organizations; it lies in the market for them, too (Graves & Cherubini, 2016 ). It lies in numerous international surveys measuring distrust (of multiple institutions and actors). It lies in a culture saturated with artifice and promotionalism. It lies in the material impact of false or intentionally misleading claims and the emotionalized public opinion they generate, from demands to and then release of a president’s full birth certificate, to rumors of a candidate’s child sex slavery ring in a Washington, DC, pizza parlor, resulting in armed confrontation. It lies in the documentation of politics and business built around the deception of artificial intelligence (bots), whose armies present the mirage of popularity or of supporters who sear their targets with brands of repugnance and chimerical flaws. It also lies in the industry of political consulting (now heavily informed by cognitive science and big data analytics, corresponding to emotionally pin-pointed, demographically microtargeted influence strategies and practices). These are a few of the ways that one empirically encounters what is being named as PT, though scholars are only beginning to provide the important critical analytical and theoretical work to explain how it is shot through with power relations and struggles.

Critical Theoretical and Philosophical Precedents

Overall, while some themes and a tradition of critique toward authoritative truth claims from the Enlightenment to its critics in Marxism and postmodernism are consistent with many aspects of PT sociopolitical conditions and theory, they differ in major ways with regard to who or what is the subject and object of (dis-)trust in the authority to (re-)present truth and use it for political purposes. They also differ greatly in their explanations for shifts in dynamics of authority, trust, and truth-telling/-believing, PT being closely associated with cognitive scientific, technological, and ethical explanations.

Enlightenment thought, in both its rationalist and empiricist strands, critiqued powerful traditional institutions of truth-telling, which it viewed as highly superstitious, yet having a monopoly on means to enforce their theories and (rationally indefensible) truth claims. Their targets of critique ranged from the relationship of religious truth to theories of human potential for thinking and political practice associated with critiques of monarchy and aristocratic class systems (Bristow, 2017 ; Israel, 2001 ).

In its questioning and politicizing of representations of reality, the Marxist tradition of ideological critique also resonates with PT theory and the world that it describes. This tradition, which runs through influential theorists such as Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Stuart Hall, and Slavoj Žižek, among others, takes as a starting point Marx’s idea that people become aware of class conflict in capitalism through its broad cultural forms—“legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic”—while those forms are also the stuff of great illusionists (Marx, 1978 , p. 5; Williams, 1976 , p. 156).

In addition, the Marxist critique of reason and Enlightenment issuing from the Frankfurt School, with a heavy emphasis on the role of entertainment culture and 20th-century media technology, anticipates some PT themes. Horkheimer and Adorno’s influential Dialectic of Enlightenment posited that “culture industries” served the colonization of reason (including science) for capitalist exploitation, and anodyne mass media contents largely served a broad veil of socioeconomic deception, a point developed by Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle (see also Edelman, 1988 , 2001 ).

However, PT has a particularly political, informational, and rhetorical emphasis less central to these earlier critical theories. What is more, those previous accounts broadly viewed the category of masses (the majority of citizen-consumers, nonelite without great policy decision-making power) as passive to the realities reported and views offered by news media and political figures. Post-truth, in stark contrast, emphasizes discord, confusion, polarized views, and understanding, well- and misinformed competing convictions, and elite attempts to produce and manage these “truth markets” or competitions. In PT, the idea is not that lay citizens see the world falsely through the ideology of ruling-class thinkers, but that “popular” conceptions of reality have become confusing or suspicious because of the saturation of reality representation with games of expertly researched and thus exclusive strategic deception—of pan-partisan nature. This is an instrumentalization of representation, of reality given new media technologies of surveillance and emotional message targeting as never before. While there may be points of intersection, the overall driving questions, material conditions that surround them (not the least media technological and economic ones), and sets of power relations cannot be rigorously viewed as identical.

Jürgen Habermas’s historical account of the structural transformation of the bourgeois public sphere ( 1989 ), despite the many criticisms of it, also has several key ideas that remain pertinent to theories and critiques of PT. The most important is his account of reason and public deliberation being gradually colonized by the state and staged in news media, offered for public opinion formation without deliberation by citizens who would identify the issues or problems in the first place. Habermas warned of professional political communication and polling that elites used to legitimate their hold on power through the production of public opinion. As with other precursors, from ideology critique to postmodern theory, the structural transformation of the public sphere is an important predecessor but does not capture the different historical facets of the PT condition and its analyses.

Postmodernism

Despite some claims that PT politics and society are the product of postmodern theory (McIntyre, 2018 ), PT only shares with it a general concern about knowledge, truth, and reality.

Regarding common themes, some aspects of Jean Baudrillard’s critical theory resonate more strongly with PT, especially Baudrillard’s notion, similar to Debord’s “spectacle,” that social life and subjectivity had become consumed by a techno-consumerist flood of images, simulations and hyper-reality, more real than reality (and having no necessary relationship to it) ( 1983 ). Baudrillard’s position that “illusion is the fundamental rule” resonates with PT ( 2001 ). However, his theory of causation does not stress problems of competing trust, authority, bias, political polarization, algorithmically customized experiences with perceptual and epistemic repercussions and other topics at the heart of PT conditions and theory.

Nor is there across work labeled postmodern, with rare exceptions, anything like the contemporary influence of the cognitive or neurosciences in PT. For example, the neuro-philosophical turn associated with Antonio Damasio and colleagues comes in the 1990s (Damasio’s Descartes’ Error , 1994 ), and has only more recently come to have interdisciplinary and increasingly broad public impact. Differences between PT and postmodern thought are more pronounced yet when considering PT as a condition.

A Post-Truth Condition?

Speaking of a PT condition echoes Lyotard’s influential “report on knowledge,” The Postmodern Condition ( 1979 ) and recalls its consequent public intellectual and academic panic; however, Lyotard’s focus was more on shifts regarding overarching narratives that justified knowledge claims (knowledge authorized by the Enlightenment’s residual “grand narratives” of progress, science, Marxism, and so forth). Lyotard emphasized the collapse of these metanarratives associated with a modern period, and the proliferation of less ambitious, nontotalizing explanations and justifications for knowledge ( petits récits ).

In contrast, a PT condition is not simply about the fragmentation of justifying stories for truth claims, but one beset by suspicion of truth-tellers as dishonest. Post-truth especially refers to a sociopolitical condition perceived as rifer than ever before with dishonesty and distrust, inaccuracies or false knowledge, all corresponding to a crisis of shared trusted adjudicating authorities. Systematic deception and lack of authority are furthermore reproduced by and contribute to a problem of distrust (Stoker, 2017 , pp. 35–36). In sum, the public problems for which PT is shorthand are epistemic (false knowledge, competing truth claims); fiduciary (distrust of society-wide authoritative truth-tellers, trust in micro-truth-tellers); and ethicomoral (conscious disregard for factual evidence—bullshitting—or intentional, strategic falsehoods/lying—dishonesty), the latter of which is often bracketed or abstracted into institutional logics of political strategy (Harding, 2008 ).

Citizen-audiences are fragmented in liberal democracies (Napoli, 2011 ), where thanks especially to competing truths and truth-tellers or prevalent nondialogue between them, political polarization ensues (Doherty, Kiley, & Johnson, 2017 ). Contemporary liberal democracies are said to lack common authorities, discourses, and institutions that may effectively suture these competing knowledges and authorities and reform populations into national identities that necessarily supersede partisan and ideological particularities (McCoy & McEvers, 2017 ). It is not farfetched then to speak of PT as a potential twilight of the stable liberal democratic nation-state and institutions that held it together, which partly explains the heightened discourse of panic from some quarters of popular politics and academia (Bennett & Livingston, 2018 ).

The Growth of Post-Truth in Popular and Academic Discourse

Post-truth appears to have first been used in academic and public discourse in the early 1990s, but its use increased 2,000% between 2015 and 2016 (Oxford Dictionaries, n.d. ). Two popular American books from 2004 drew attention to the anxiety about public trust and knowledge to which PT now commonly refers. In The Post-Truth Era , Ralph Keyes argued mass dishonesty had arrived. The same year, in his book When Presidents Lie ( 2004 ), Eric Alterman coined the term “post-truth presidency,” with reference to the Bush II presidency. The following year, 2005 , the Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt published a best-selling book On Bullshit , the latter of which, unlike lying, he said, demonstrated a simple disregard for the factuality of one’s truth claims. It was originally published as an essay in 1986 but attracted renewed interest in the new political and media context of the early 21st century . Like 2004 , 2012 was a major year for reflections on the crisis of truth and facts. James Fallows wrote about the “Post-truth media,” while Farhad Manjoo, later a New York Times technology columnist, announced the arrival of “post-fact society” in True Enough . 1 All of these seminal popular works emphasized rampant lying as the primary driver of PT politics and society. However, critical communication scholars have identified other forces at work in the production of PT. 2

There has been a recent outpouring of communication research on PT, almost entirely from quantitative methodological approaches, reflecting what some critical communication researchers describe as a neopositivist dominance in the field (Fuchs, 2017 ). These studies usually originate from well-funded quantitative and big-data-centered institutes and think tanks, government (e.g., the EU), or, alternately, from an experimental methodological individualist side, cross-fertilizing with cognitive science (cognitive biases, motivated reasoning, etc.). While the studies provide important empirical data, deeper theorization is scarce, critical theorization even scarcer (e.g., see Kavanagh & Rich, 2018 ; European Commission, 2018 ). These studies frequently end up reproducing a kind of panicked realism, nostalgia for the mass communication age, especially for journalistic gatekeeping, and result in prognostic guides for media literacy and journalistic fact-checking. The few critical communication treatments of PT point to more complex historical and structural explanations, and thus solutions. 3

Critical scholarly attention to shifts in public knowledge or belief and trust have been developing since the turn of the millennium (though their citational practices show that they often developed unbeknownst of one another). John Hartley was perhaps first to have employed PT in the communication field, in his book The Politics of Pictures (1992a), and he also proposed the idea of journalism as a truth “regime” in Tele-ology (1992b). However, he necessarily refers to a specific mass broadcast era—certainly pre-Web 2.0 and in most places pre-Internet (1992a, p. 137). He nonetheless anticipates later PT theory by focusing on blurring of fact/fiction boundaries in popular media (namely, television). While a regime generates and polices boundaries between fact and fiction (not the least in journalistic professional codes; he cites the Australian Journalists Association), hierarchies of truth and regimes are contested. Publishing and TV, he argues, are “incommensurate regimes of truth” (1992b, p. 46).

Scholars in the 1990s had begun to discuss popular culture in the context of legitimate and illegitimate knowledges as well as trust in authority, dramatized by TV series such as the X-Files (Bellon, 1999 ; Lavery, Hague, & Cartwright, 1996 ). Working on the popular fascination with “conspiracy culture,” Dean ( 1998 ) was already speaking of American society as characterized by “fugitive truth” at the turn of the 21st century . A small group of scholars continued to pursue questions of popular knowledges and politics through Foucault’s concepts of truth regimes and subjugated knowledges, with particular emphasis on conspiracy theory and gossip (Birchall, 2006 ; Bratich, 2008 ) as well as through Stephen Colbert’s satirical coinage “truthiness,” what is felt to be true (Jones, 2009 ). However, thus far, the scholarly emphasis on truth, media and politics, dominant and subjugated knowledges and power did not identify a conjunctural shift with regard to public truth and trust and had not begun to explore in depth the multiple, converging mechanisms behind such a thesis.

The Bush II administration’s propaganda apparatus and confusion around Iraq–al-Qaeda links and Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction was also a turning point for early PT scholarship. Scholars began to theorize cultural shifts issuing from causal synergies (Harsin, 2006 ; Jones, 2009 ). Jones saw truthiness as emblematic of a shift from a journalistic regime of truth, based on “truth in fact,” to one where a mix of groups (citizens, politicians, journalists, satirists) creates “believable fictions.” He drew on a notion of “truth in essence,” which pervaded a range of popular media forms (see also Jones & Baym, 2010 ). 4 These scholars stressed the waning of journalism’s privileged institutional role as truth-teller or mediator; its role was contested and, by default, shared—which resulted in liberal democratic panic, in journalism, the political establishment, and academia.

Other scholars placed far more causal emphasis on digital technology and how especially right-wing political actors used it in tandem with populist emotional rhetorical styles and the attempt to discredit institutions and experts (Van Zoonen, 2012 ). Van Zoonen described a new “ i- pistemology,” where questions of knowledge are approached “from the basis of I (as in me, myself) and Identity, with the Internet as the great facilitator” ( 2012 , p. 60). Harsin ( 2014 , 2015 , 2018 ) expanded the theory that truth regimes embedded in a digital capitalist attention/information economy were in such conflict or competition that “truth markets” (profit-seeking partisan information brokers, on the one hand; and rumor debunking and fact-checking businesses from Snopes.com to the Washington Post , on the other) were proposed within an emergent regime of PT (see also Mukherjee, 2017 ).

Post-truth Misinforms and Disinforms: Rumor Bombs, Fake News, and Lies

Post-truth appears through a repertoire of forms bearing political (mis-)use of false statements or a disregard for or misrecognition of facts, and a corresponding false belief or confusion (Andersen, 2017 ; Ingraham, 2016 ). While the larger cultural precondition, a widespread distrust of institutions that could be respected as truth-tellers across a wide ideological audience spectrum, will be explored more in-depth momentarily, one can first say that PT is associated with several major types of communication, statements or narratives, all of which are subclasses of deceptive communication: misinformation, fake news, rumor bombs, and lying. Disinformation, rumor bombs, and fake news have mass communication era antecedents in both war and security (gray propaganda) and commercial communication (advertising and public relations). All can be said to be forms of strategic communication and not mere accidental or innocent misstatements of facts.

Deliberate misstatement (disinformation) is hard to prove definitively, yet one can assume that many ambiguous, misleading, or partly false political statements are deliberate, given the fact that this genre of communication is highly professionalized and mediatized (Serazio, 2017 ). These strategic misstatements or innocent misstatements that attract receptive audiences then generate a political economic response by journalism and new businesses in fact-checking and rumor debunking (supported by advertising or, less often, donors), which is why they may be understood literally as truth markets (Harsin, 2015 ).

Post-truth is thus not simply about lies and false beliefs but also, perhaps even especially, about confusion amid a surfeit of information and influential appeals, the difficulty in discerning one from the other, the constant selective use and presentation of information and appeals for strategic political (and business) ends, and the incessant public disputes about what is (in-)accurate and (dis-)honest. Some inaccurate statements of fact are made innocently, if unethically and cavalierly (i.e., what is called bullshit, without regard for knowledge of true or false [Frankfurt, 2005 ]). But a great deal of it is deliberate, strategically aimed at disinforming as a way to manage opponents and/or govern by capturing attention.

Analytically speaking, the forms PT takes are often not well distinguished. Lies, rumors, fake news, spin, propaganda are used synonymously. Much of what is perceived as PT communication is a form of two general categories of communication (in lieu of simple information, which never appears without a communication context): disinformation and misinformation. Stahl ( 2010 ) explains a common distinction between misinformation and disinformation (though some tend to interchange the two).

Misinformation, on the one hand, is the spreading of inaccurate or false information while mistakenly thinking one is sharing accurate information (in reality, the person or organization spreading it is misinformed). On the other hand, disinformation is seen as deliberately spreading false or inaccurate information. In practice, the two are closely linked. One can spread a false statement that one took to be true, which was originally produced to misinform. Disinformers may produce misinformers. In terms of ethics, intention and effect, misinform corresponds to inaccuracy, a false statement, but not a falsehood. If the recipient of misinformation believes it, takes it as fact or true, then he or she is misinformed but not manipulated for strategic ends of the misinformer. Disinformation, however, is closer to lying, as both are dishonest. The producer of disinformation knowingly utters falsehoods, not just false statements. In between, perhaps, is the bullshitter, who, according to Frankfurt’s influential account, makes statements that may be false; the point is that he/she does not care ( 2005 ).

Rumor Bombs

While deliberate rumors (just like lies) in politics are ancient, the fact that they have become core issues with clear effects in public culture appears new, if not unprecedented. No US president before Obama felt forced to release his long-form birth certificate in response to constantly weaponized rumors that he was not born in the United States; the rumor was used to “bomb” the news agenda and preoccupy Obama’s communication professionals to respond defensively. The fact that majorities do not believe it is all the more proof of its efficacy (Dimock, July 15, 2008 ). Influential in the history of rumor scholarship, Shibutani ( 1966 ) argued that rumors were “improvised news,” a non-professional form of news-telling in conditions of information scarcity. However, in 21st-century media and politics, rumors flourish in the opposite condition: information overload (Andrejevic, 2013 ), fragmentation of attention, and decline of culture-wide authorities or truth-tellers (Harsin, 2006 , 2014 , 2015 ). Political rumors were thriving in contemporary conditions marked by a public knowledge (epistemic) and trust (fiduciary) crisis. Yet, they were not traditional rumors. Rumor bombs correspond to fake news and strategic political communication developments, which helped distinguish them from simple rumors and as a counterpart to other contemporary communication bombs (google bombs and twitter bombs, for example, which were various ways of “bombing” the field of attention). Rumor bombs referred to the core definition of rumor as a statement whose veracity is unknown or unprovable and to communication bombs as longtime forms of information warfare migrating from military to politics as “war by other means” (Caplow, 1947 ). Iraq–al-Qaeda links, John Kerry lied about Vietnam, Obama is a Muslim, and former French President François Hollande was supported by over 700 mosques—all are rumor bombs professionally operationalized in popular political struggles (Conason, 2004 ; Kessler, 2014 ; Harsin, 2018a ).

Rumor bombs normally differ from fake news in the sense that rumors may turn out to be true. Fake news is false news, though its core propositions may be contextualized by facts (for example, Hillary Clinton is a real person, and Comet Ping Pong is a real pizzeria in Washington, DC, neither fact of which makes true the associated false claim that she ran a child sex slavery ring in the basement of the said pizzeria). Furthermore, rumor bombs tend to use deliberately ambiguous or strategically polysemic claims to generate not just belief but conflict and disagreement or debate. For example, what does “links” mean in the claim there were Iraq–al-Qaeda “links” or “ties”? The claim may be more influential when “links” is not defined and left to the audience’s imagination. A rumor bomb may be accompanied by a story, attempting to provide evidence for the core claim. That evidence usually is not fake; it is just an example of poor reasoning: Obama’s name is not Christian; he has been photographed in what appears to be Muslim clothing; therefore, Obama is Muslim. The conflict and disagreement that rumor bombs produce in turn produces confusion or disorientation—a structure of feeling deep in the core of PT.

Fake news is a term of American origin, whose first use appears briefly in 1992 with regard to video news releases, news segments produced by public relations then broadcast by television news as content journalists had produced through reporting procedures (Rampton, 2005 ). It seems to have had no regular public use before 1999 , at which point it became associated with self-identified comedy news shows, such as the Daily Show , Saturday Night Live ’s Weekend Update, and The Colbert Report , which had origins in satirical “news” publications such as The Onion in the United States (Harsin, 2018a ). By 2015 , it took on a globalizing negative twist of connotations associated with PT, bound up with geopolitical propaganda and artificial intelligence (AI), or “bots” (Chen, 2015 ; Riotta, 2017 ). In an even more recent globalizing trend, “fake news” has become a popular ad hominem for discrediting any unfavorable news coverage or criticisms from opponents. Fake news was deemed such an important recent cultural form of PT that it was named and then recognized as a 2017 word of the year by Collins Dictionary (following PT as the Oxford Dictionary ’s 2016 word of the year), in an infotaining development of dictionaries to self-promote by breaking a “word of the year” that generates discussion and profits (Flood, 2017 ). Fake news is, like rumor bombs, a sub-category of disinformation, alternately called “false news” and “junk news.” Unlike rumor bombs, fake news is not usually a mix of interpretive ambiguity and fact, but it includes core false statements (things that did not happen, that do not even exist), and therefore are sometimes wrongly referred to as lies.

Consider also the difference between fake news and lies. One may assume that fake/false news is at base mere lies. But a lie is, technically, a deliberately false statement (Mahon, 2016 ). A lie is not a series of statements, but fake news suggests a story, an article, all statements contained in which are unlikely to all be false, as lies or inaccuracies. Fake news is often characterized by a core falsehood surrounded by factual statements or details. Reuters Digital News annual report for 2017 notes that

“definitions of ‘fake news’ are fraught with difficulty and respondents frequently mix up three categories: (1) news that is ‘invented’ to make money or discredit others; (2) news that has a basis in fact but is ‘spun’ to suit a particular agenda; and (3) news that people don’t feel comfortable about or don’t agree with.”

Meanwhile, the Oxford Institute for the Study of Computational Propaganda defines fake news as “misleading, deceptive or incorrect information, purporting to be real news about politics, economics or culture” (Hazard Owen, 2018 ).

Though many definitions of fake news attribute an intent to deceive for political ends, some fake news producers have intent to deceive only to make money through the attention and circulation the fake news receives, even while it can have expected political effects (belief, confusion, agenda-setting). Those effects, through exploitation by more strategic partisans who aim to spread disinformation, may have a secondary level of effects, political ones—and the secondary agent may have no interest in financial profit. Conversely, some fake news producers originally aim to deceive only for political ends. Either way, news organizations, which legitimate the fake news by making it real news that titillates large audiences, will profit from it. American CBS news executive Warren Moonves underlined this point when speaking about Trump’s 2016 rumor-bombing candidacy: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS” (Bond, 2016 ; Pickard, 2017 ).

Fake news is usually the presentation of new events where the event is presented as a discovery of something hitherto hidden (Obama’s fake birth certificate allegations; allegations that Clinton sold weapons to ISIS). While in the era of citizen journalism, fake news could appear rather unadorned, thanks to easily accessible photo-editing software and web page templates, it may also appear in the style of news organizations with high production values, such as the New York Times , Le Monde , and CNN . Mimicking the style of professional journalism is the way fake news produces its credibility for some audiences; it is even reflected in web addresses (URLs), which imitate recognized news sites by inserting the words “news” or “report,” or more partisan-comforting brand names: worldnewsreport.com, winningdemocrats.com, conservativestate.com (McClain, 2017 ; Silverman, 2016 ).

All of these previously discussed forms of PT misinformation can contain lies. Yet there is a difference between them. What is lying? According to Mahon, “The most widely accepted definition of lying” is Isenberg’s: “a statement made by one who does not believe it with the intention that someone else shall be led to believe it” (Isenberg in Mahon, 2016 ).

Post-truth is perhaps most saliently marked by an emphasis on lying, constant accusations of lying (without proof) and revelations of lying (with convincing proof). While it is nearly impossible to prove definitively that there are more lies or liars today than in the past, there is clearly an observable discourse about lying, which claims that there are more, that people perceive or feel there must be more, because there is also so much empirically verifiable distrust and documentable dishonesty (a quintessential example: fake news).

In his book When Presidents Lie ( 2004 ), Eric Alterman discusses what he argues were major lies of US presidents from FDR to JFK, Johnson to Reagan. For the George W. Bush administration, Alterman coins the term “post-truth presidency” to describe the general mode of dishonesty that he saw pervading the quotidian White House communications. Alterman is correct both to emphasize the commonplaceness of dishonesty in the history of modern presidential communication and to signal something of a historic shift in the Bush regime. It is of little wonder that a public discourse heavy with accusations, perceptions, and documentations of lying could have effects on political trust and motivation.

Political communication and news practices and values have shifted in a way that favors even banalized lying, whereby “honesty is a novelty” (Corner & Pels, 2003 , p. 11). The very conditions for being considered honest and truthful have been reconfigured thanks to processes of mediatization and celebrification in politics, the internalizing of entertainment genre expectations and values in their political performances as a perceived requirement for gaining attention.

Yet, while claims of increased lying appear constantly (Manjoo, 2008 ), it would be almost impossible to prove such claims convincingly. If PT’s forms can be recognized as having particular qualities, the question remains: what are the mechanisms that have brought it about now? It is argued that multiple agents synergized more recently in ways previously not possible.

Four Synergistic Agents

Thus, while aspects of PT communication and its context have existed before (if not always) new forces have converged with old, creating a communications environment unlike anything seen before. Later theorists have referred to mediatization as a macro-category describing the way mediation has engulfed all institutions instead of, in the predigital mass communication era, these institutions having some separation from media as an institution itself (Couldry & Hepp, 2016 ; Hepp & Krotz, 2014 , p. 2; Livingstone, 2009 ). Yet while the general concepts of mediatization, hybrid media systems (Chadwick, 2013 ), or mixed media culture (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 1999 ) are useful starting points for thinking about the causes of PT communication practices, critical approaches must further examine and theorize the historically and culturally specific mechanisms of PT within the new highly datafied capitalist communication structure. Four major historical agents synergistically structure PT communication forms and practices, while having particular national conjunctural specificities, themselves deeply mediating these changes.

Face 1: Technology and Attention Economy (Speed and Cognition)

Technology is treated as a category of influence here, but with important qualifications, since it does not exist outside political economic, cultural, and other contexts and forces. Considerations of technological agency in PT production must include the fact that they do not exist free of human agency or goals. In fact, the digital mediascape is the grounds for an economy embedded in communication technology as never before, which restructures the way communication can be produced, circulated, used, and received. Strategic political communication in PT is thus inevitably parasitic on and structured by attentional capitalism. Attentional habits are then structured through the programming of apps and platforms and their algorithms. At the same time, various forms of digital technology have enabled a dizzying amount of cultural production (user-generated content) and social media platforms have permitted their potentially broad diffusion as mass self-communication (Castells, 2009 ).

However, the constant strategic uses of and attempts to manage the spaces of mass self-communication (big data analytics, microtargeting, neuromarketing, bots, trolls) likely help explain the subsequent effects on trust and truth (surveys showing little trust in digital platforms or the Internet generally, thus also suggesting users’ cynical disavowal). Mostly overlooked in the discussions of PT is the fact that the digital communication infrastructure, though identified by many citizens as a source of political news and means for political speech, is not designed to suit democratic political communication or trustworthy information but, rather, to suit recent forms of consumer capitalism, “the attention economy.” In this sense the Internet, and especially social media, in places like the United States has quickly become economically structured in a way it took American broadcast journalism years to succumb to, as Marc Gunther noted in 1999 : “Twenty years ago, there was no network news ‘business.’ The Big Three broadcast television networks—ABC, CBS and NBC—all covered news, but none generally made money doing so. Nor did they expect to turn a profit from news programming” ( 1999 ). However, it is not simply the economic embeddedness of platforms that need attention in a discussion of PT but also technologies that have enabled or “democratized” cultural production.

Part of the new production and broadcast technologies include accessible photo and audiovisual editing software, as well as platforms for mass publication or broadcast. Yet the capacity to “jam” and “hack” original content, altering it while retaining an aura of authenticity, has enabled a near constant stream of deceptions (to which AI developers are responding with “reverse image search” by Google Image or TinEye). 5

Technological developments also include the powerful influence of algorithms in structuring fields of perception and trust. Algorithms structured for networking, marketing, and constant “participation” become useful for political PT ends. Thus, repetition and illusory truth (more repeated, more likely to be judged true) is extremely important in algorithmically constructed publics, polarized politics, and filter bubbles, evidenced by studies concluding that “top fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined” in the US 2016 presidential campaign (Silverman, 2016 ).

Furthermore, some PT commentary and research has put considerable causal and explanatory emphasis on algorithmic ideological filtering (echo chambers) and cognitive bias (especially confirmation bias) (Bear, 2016 ; Dieguez, 2017 ; Kavanagh & Rich, 2018 ). However, few approaches to PT so far have seen the attention economy’s techno-infrastructure as itself creating conditions unfavorable to more deliberative forms of cognition when consuming digital content (such as fake news headlines and rumor bombs). Not only is the digital communication infrastructure oriented toward profit, instead of toward dissemination of factual information, it is built for speed and constant individual movement and attention shifting, which research suggests has an impact on perception, interest, temporal reasoning, and knowledge (Carr, 2010 ; Manjoo, 2013 ; Harsin, 2014 ). Tech-focused cognitive scientists are beginning to argue that this techno-economic structure (they do not base their analyses in the structure’s embeddedness in capitalism) has effects on reasoning, long-term memory, and thus knowledge acquisition (Atchley & Lane, 2014 ). Cognition in the attention economy is typically fast, emotional, and targeted with distractions. Such an “information ecology” is not, it is argued, conducive to more deliberative political participation, thus posing challenges to proposed PT solutions, such as the necessarily slower and colder cognition required by proponents of media literacy. Technology identified as a primary cause (instead of as a secondary cause embedded in capitalism and synergizing with other agents) leads to solutions also often embedded in capitalism (self-regulation of service providers, fact-checking businesses and apps to buy—the commodification of truth).

Face 2: Journalism

Changes in journalism, such as downsizing staff while accelerating the publication pace (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 1999 , 2010 ), invited inaccuracies and vulnerabilities to hoaxes (later fake news); partly issuing from “citizen journalism,” by which everyone is now a journalist (the opposite of the progressive promise of networked journalism [Russell, 2011 ]) and which brings not just packs of watchdogs but also armies of rumor bombers and fake news purveyors. As Harwood notes, “[g]ossip, rumor and fact, truth and falsehood (with rare exceptions) have equal standard under the law and, in practice, universally coexist in the unending ‘news’ stream saturating the environment” (Harwood, 1999 ). The latter was partly explained by market pressures to grab readers’ and viewers’ attention, partly resulting in trends of infotainment and tabloidization, and politainment allowing for the repetition of rumors and disinformation as agenda-setting topics themselves (Thussu, 2009 ; Riegert & Collins, 2015 ). Market pressures are also blamed for significant amounts of public relations material that appear unidentified in news products (Bennett, 2003 , p. 175; Lewis, Williams, & Franklin, 2008 ). Finally, new apps (e.g., Bulletin) allow quick posting of citizen journalist content, while critics have warned about a “high potential for abuse,” especially for producing “fake news” (Kaufman, 2018 ). Citizen journalism app experiments are complemented on the professional end by robot (also called automated or algorithmic) journalists (Carlson, 2015 ), which risk being recuperated for strategic communication purposes, just as had been the case with human “fake reporters” under the Bush II administration (Rich, 2005 ).

In a culture of multiple institutional and professional trust deficits, journalism’s traditional credibility is threatened. If for decades, journalism relied on “authorized knowers” (Fishman, 1980 ), officials in government, business, and political organizations who were deemed knowledgeable (Epstein, 1973 ), then “webs of facticity” (Tuchman, 1978 ) become undermined in PT, for such sources, as well as their journalist-intermediaries are seen as illegitimate by millions of people. The web of facticity comes to be perceived as a web of deception that news organizations and their sources weave.

If journalism has lost authority to tell and distinguish truth, while news has a proliferating and competing cast of truth-tellers, promotional culture applies cultural pressure to journalism, politics, and everyday social relations. Its agency in PT synergy cannot be ignored.

Face 3: Promotional Culture

Promotional culture is another factor of PT cultural synergy that has been almost completely absent from public intellectual and recent computationally driven PT analyses (Harsin, 2017 ; Hearn, 2017 ). Promotional culture studies argue that culture and social relations have been powerfully transformed by the role of communication in new forms of consumer capitalism—the latter’s hyperpromotional stage, with no small effects on perceptions of honesty, truth claims, and trust-granting. According to Alison Hearn, one of promotional culture’s primary theorists:

Promotionalism names the extension of market values and commodity relations in all areas of life…. As we increasingly come to see our selves, relationships, political candidates, and social issues in terms of this logic of promotion, we can no longer determine, or read, genuinely expressive intent or determine what is truth as opposed to a lie, what is authentic as opposed to “spun.” In a population so acclimatized to the constant sell, how can we recognize or construct legitimate authority? What is the impact of the generalized public acceptance of “spin” and promotional politics on the democratic process?… [T]he logic of commodities and their promotional signs, also known as advertising and marketing, comes to dominate and structurally condition all other forms of political expression and power relations. (Hearn, 2011 )

Promotionalism’s relationship to truth has thus always been more like Harry Frankfurt’s ( 2005 ) notion of bullshit—it is agnostic toward truth in its strategies to promote attention and consumption. Promotional culture scholars view bullshit-friendly communication as having become accepted in a wider and wider array of human practices, not in the least politics (see also Davis, 2013 ). Professional bullshitters are essential to contemporary consumer economies and politics. One rarely hears about promotionalism in causal explanations of PT (and one has almost never heard of counter-attacking its origins—consumer capitalism—as a logical solution to such a powerful form of causation).

Just as the very infrastructure of contemporary communication practices, the digital attention economy, leans toward PT, so does professionalized political communication, with its modern roots in mass electric communication and mass democracy at the turn of the 20th century .

Face 4: Professional Political Communication

Promotionalism’s relationship to PT was also anticipated by Hannah Arendt in her well-known reflection “Lying in Politics,” spurred by the release of The Pentagon Papers ( 1971 ). She spoke of a “recent variety” added to “the many genres in the art of lying developed in the past: the apparently innocuous one of the public-relations managers in government who learned their trade from the inventiveness of Madison Avenue.” Arendt noted that their “origin [lay] in the consumer society” (p. 8). This importation from consumer society to politics was problematic, according to Hannah Arendt, for public relations “deals only in opinions and ‘good will,’ the readiness to buy, that is, in intangibles whose concrete reality is at a minimum” (p. 8).

The promotionalism that Arendt regarded as a threat to democracy has been discussed in political communication textbooks for several decades now as “professionalization,” a trend in elite political communication that since the onset of TV has put “image-making” at the center of politics (Lilleker, 2014 ; McNair, 2017 ). This professionalization is marked by the growth of political marketing, using highly strategized forms of influence employed by cognitive science-oriented commercial and military communication (Alic, Branscomb, Brooks, Epstein, & Carter, 1992 ; Lees, Strömbäck, & Rudd, 2010 ). One may recall here that Arendt’s influential account of lying in politics ends by emphasizing the spread of promotional communication orientations to politics, resulting in a propensity for lying, and thus contributing to PT (Arendt, 1972 ).

Several PT commentators point to the post-9/11 Bush regime’s sophisticated propaganda as a turning point in contemporary state communication. It is important to note that the conjunctural conditions of communication were and still are quite different than those of pre-Internet times, while the practice of strategic political communication, aiming at creating its own realities to which it can respond to achieve its goals, is a staple of modern mass communication influences, in the commercial and political sector. A passage from Daniel Boorstin’s influential The Image is illustrative on this point. Boorstin discusses one of the most influential theorist-practitioners of public influence in the 20th century , Edward Bernays, by way of Napoleon (indicating a cross-fertilization of military, political, and commercial communication). Of the public relations-produced realities he calls “pseudo-events,” Boorstin writes:

The power to make a reportable event is thus the power to make experience. One is reminded of Napoleon’s apocryphal reply to his general, who objected that circumstances were unfavorable to a proposed campaign: “Bah, I make circumstances!” The modern public relations counsel—and he is, of course, only one of many twentieth century creators o pseudo-events—has come close to fulfilling Napoleon’s idle boast. “The counsel on public relations,” Mr. Bernays explains, “not only knows what news value is, but knowing it, he is in a position to make news happen. He is a creator of events.” ( 1992 , pp. 10–11)

Roughly 80 years after Bernays’s confident declaration, Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s legendary spin doctor and strategist, bragged that journalists naively belonged to a “reality-based community,” while strategists like him “create our own reality,” which they (journalists) are free to “study.” Journalists will be left “to just study what we [strategists] do” (Suskind, 2004 ). The arrogance aside, of course, communication strategists are sometimes forced to respond to journalist-produced events, and perhaps more often, to events opponents publicize with the assistance of news organizations. They nonetheless lead by misleading.

Indeed, the Bush regime’s communication strategists ushered in the shifting signification of fake news registers from largely comedic to more traditional political communication (Rich, 2005 ). The Bush team used “fake reporters” and fake broadcast segments (video news releases dutifully broadcast by local newscasts) over a decade prior to the term becoming a “word of the year.” In the New York Times , Frank Rich made the crossover explicit: “The White House Stages Its ‘Daily Show,’” he wrote ( February 20, 2005 ). Writing a year before, but looking back at 2003 , Naomi Klein dubbed it the “year of the fake” in a Nation column. She wrote that 2003 was, for starters, “a year that waged open war on truth and facts and celebrated fakes and forgeries of all kinds…: fake rationales for war, a fake President dressed as a fake soldier declaring a fake end to combat and then holding up a fake turkey.” Nieman Reports spoke not just of an episode but of an “Age of Pseudo-reporting,” citing a “spate of media infamies known by the names Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher, Jeff Gannon, and Karen Ryan” (Greve, 2005 ). Recently, the use of big-data-driven political marketing (even neuropolitical marketing), bots and trolls (human and non-), and censorship in several countries, contribute mightily to PT synergy (Bulut & Yörük, 2017 ; Harsin, 2015 , 2018a , 2018b ).

As Arendt foresaw, organized, systematic lying, or, more easily proven, deceptions, the bread and butter of consumer capitalism and the communications wing of the state security apparatus, have come also to be the organizing force of mediated political life. Thus, when analysts shrug skeptically at claims that there is more lying now than before, they are looking at lying and deception through a lens too methodologically individualist to comprehend the production side of it. Both consumer capitalism, deeply embedded in everyday life, and elite liberal democracy, as its communication apparatus has been structured for over 100 years, demand deceptive communication. It is systematic, strategic, highly organized. There is a structural incitement to deception.

American democracy, like most if not all contemporary liberal democracies, has been, among other things, an evolving competition of fakery. This is not to suggest it fails by comparison to some essential, purely honest democratic utopia (a fantasy, of course) but is rather to emphasize the massive scale of organization and systematicity. Now fakery is embedded in everyday commercial promotionalism as well as in mass self-communication (individual broadcasting) amid historic levels of distrust; thus, it is understandable that deception’s effects would be felt more intensely to the point of PT today. Meanwhile panics around PT disavow how embedded promotionalism and deception is in 20th – 21st-century liberal democratic political communication practices, which may suggest that such panics are a fundamental symptom of PT itself.

(Post-)Trust

The foundation of popular truth, often taken for granted in the heyday of mass communication and journalism’s monopoly on gatekeeping and authoritative truth (re-)telling, has come into greater relief in the PT moment: (dis-)trust. The sociologist Georg Simmel argued that trust is actually a “weak form of inductive knowledge,” and “very few relationships would endure if trust were not as strong as, or stronger than, rational proof or personal observation” ( 2004 , p. 179). Understanding shifts in the communicational mechanisms of trust may be seen as key to understanding the epistemic problems often discussed separately.

What is the evidence for widespread and increasing distrust? Consider, for example, declining numbers of voters in presidential and parliamentary elections across the West, where similar techniques of strategic political communication, among other things, are imitated. Countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and France have seen participation dips by 30 percentage points over the last 50 years (International IDEA, n.d. ).

Compare the decline in voter turnout with the rise of self-identified disenfranchised movements and new parties in the very same countries. On the right, one sees the Front National in France, the UK Independence Party, Germany’s AFD (Alternative for Germany), and even the insurgent democratic socialist challenge to the US Democratic Party by Bernie Sanders. Meanwhile, left “prefigurative” social-political movements such as les Indignados in Spain, Occupy in the United States, and Nuit Debout in France have stressed their alienation from liberal democracy’s lack of choices and means for a real hearing of grievances, a critique realized in their own performances of direct democracy.

Distrust is also widely self-reported. Edelman’s Trust Barometer study for 2017 featured a provocative headline announcing a “Global Implosion of Trust.” Some of their highlights across 43 countries include the following: CEO credibility at lowest point ever; trust in media fell and is at lowest point ever in 17 countries; trust in government dropped (at 41%) in 14 countries, being the least trusted in institution in half of the countries surveyed. Categories of leaders dropped in trustworthiness across the board: an all-time low of 37% for CEOs and government leaders are the least credible of all, at 29% (“2017 Edelman Trust Barometer,” 2017 ). The news media in particular suffers significant distrust, across the United States and Europe. Just over half of Americans in a 2017 survey said they trust information from the news media “some,” while about 15% trusted it “a lot” (“People have more trust in ‘my’ media than ‘the’ media,” 2017 ). However, people have more trust in their own choice of news media. Post-truth thus thrives in this context of political polarization.

Perceptions of widespread cynicism of course also have effects on trust. As Sissela Bok notes in her classic examination of lying in public life and a discussion of Hannah Arendt’s influential comments on public lying, “Even when the substitution of falsehood for truth is not total, but seems random or partial to the deceived, or when it affects matters they consider crucial, such a state of cynicism may result. For this reason, the many forms of international deception which are assumed to be merely a ‘part of the game’ by governments can have far-reaching effects on both internal and external trust” ( 1978 , p. 150). Speaking primarily of governments, she adds, in 1978 , that “there is a growing evidence that the world audiences to which propaganda is directed are becoming more distrustful…. As a result, citizens the world over have less confidence that they can influence what governments do” (p. 150). She was of course writing before the Bush administration’s strategic communication efforts to promote the Iraq War, and before the financial crisis of 2008 , among other major events in a cultural slide toward generalized distrust.

If, as Simmel and others argue, trust is a kind of crude knowledge, which may be closest to the kind of knowledge citizens exercise on public issues, pervasive deficits thereof would likely lead to not just any kind of epistemic but public epistemic instabilities. As Longino explains, “[m]uch of what passes for common knowledge is acquired from others. We depend on experts to tell us what is wrong or right with our appliances, our cars, our bodies. Indeed, much of what we later come to know depends on what we previously learned as children from our parents and teachers. We acquire knowledge of the world through the institutions of education, journalism, and scientific inquiry” (para 9, 2015 ). Consequently, “we do not know most of what we think we know.”

While 1980s and 1990s postmodern theory already flagged scholarly preoccupations with epistemic skepticism, legitimacy and reality, the contemporary focus on lying and dishonesty distinguishes PT discourse from its 1990s forerunner (Lyotard, 1984 ). Post-truth’s epistemic crisis is really an ethicofiduciary one. Its epistemic crises are the effect of distrust and dishonesty crises regarding systematic widespread deception.

It is worth noting that, in this critical synergy theory of PT, the panic about irrational duped citizens appears misplaced. Given these conditions from public relations- and hoax-infiltrated journalism, resource rich strategic political communication using sophisticated data analytics, deceptive AI (bots and trolls), cognitive scientifically informed microtargeted messages, and a widespread promotional culture of exaggerated claims and games of fakery for profit—it could be said that people would be irrational not to be highly skeptical of truth claims. The question, of course, is what kind of performances and communication successfully produce trust and truth in this climate.

Trust and Emotional Truth

Anthony Giddens ( 1994 ) has argued that modern and traditional societies differ importantly in terms of trust-granting, and that late modern societies underwent a shift from “passive trust” toward social institutions and their experts to general distrust and fleeting, “active trust” today. Trust-granting appears to have taken even more intensely restricted roles, based much of the time on performativity (rhetorical devices to produce credibility), ongoing “facework.”

If trust amid PT is short term and, if maintained, constantly renewed, how is active public trust performed and earned today? One argument is that the synergistic agencies of PT favor highly emotional communication, and that this is partly the way many subjects identify with truthful communication. This turn to emotion and affect is not based on a traditional rational/irrational, reason/emotion dualism. On the contrary, it builds on revolutions in cognitive science and neurophilosophy over the last thirty years, which holds that there is no actual separation between emotion and reason. However, they insist that the conceptual distinction be maintained since there are different degrees of emotion in reasoning, even shown to be located in different parts of the brain (Damasio, 1994 ; Kahneman, 2011 ; Westen, 2008 ). While promotional industries and political communication have for some time used this research to produce strategies (hoping especially for quick manageable affective responses), journalism is now visiting this research in order to manage visitor attention online (and probably in what remains of print and broadcast) (Song, 2013 ).

Resource-rich political and economic actors using big data analytics and sentiment analysis target audiences emotionally, hoping not simply to produce beliefs (ideological effects) but to modulate cognition, emotion, and attention, via quick likes/dislikes, shares, before moving on. In a culture of speed and attention scarcity, of exigencies and expectations of faking or exaggeration (promotionalism), slower, perhaps “quieter” civil forms of communication are suspicious to some audiences. These audiences are attracted to what appears “authentic,” which seems to periodically escape the exigencies of promotional culture (Banet-Weiser, 2012 ). These fleeting moments have been described as emotional truth and “emo-truth” (Harsin, 2017 , 2018a ).

Emotional/emo-truth theory argues that there are parallels in reality TV and popular politics regarding the way truth and trust is performed and granted. The theory is based on insights from audience studies of melodrama genres (Ang) and “fact-based” programming’s (i.e., reality TV) audiences (Hill, 2007 , p. 141; Grindstaff, 2008 ):

Emo-truth is truth where emotion serves as inference (prime or indexical sign, emotional or unconscious affective response, and presto: truth). It is felt (though not necessarily consciously), not accompanied by long temporal reasoning. It is akin to what reality TV audience scholarship has documented as trust in perceived authenticity (i.e. truth) of moments where participants lose control, get angry and aggressive, bully, or, conversely, cry. It is a variant of what Laura Grindstaff in her landmark work on sensational talk shows called “the money shot.” (Harsin, 2018b , p. 45)

With such pervasive, systematic, strategic artifice in PT society and politics, it is these ephemeral moments of emo-truth that connect with some citizen-audiences, which helps to explain the success of aggressive emo-truth masculinities, fond of insulting, spectacular claims, and of attacking political correctness, of figures such as US’s Donald Trump, Philippines’ Roderigo Duterte, and the UK’s Boris Johnson, among others in varying degrees of the style (Harsin, 2017 ). Not all PT political performance is emo-truth; and not all of its performers do it as virtuosically or constantly. The key is that the connection of trust, the lack of concern with the falsity of some truth claims, is explained by an emotional, not rational connection, and perhaps for the angriest most distrustful citizens, emo-truth’s anger and aggression is most appealing. Emotional truth and emo-truth political communication also show signs of the normalization of celebrity politics and its games of authenticity and appeal (Street, 2004 ).

Solutions to Post-Truth as Perceived Problem

If critical communication studies have offered preliminary theories of PT as a historical and cultural phenomenon, from such a diagnosis, what kind of prognosis may it offer, while shedding a critical light on popular solutions proffered less critical PT theories? The main solutions proposed thus far (mostly from the computational and cognitive scientific sides of communication study) can be summarized as the following: techno-curatives, such as AI filtering of PT claims/stories; human fact-checking, especially rooted in journalism; strategic human responses to cognitive bias; more vigorous self-regulation by social media providers; and media literacy initiatives (Kavanagh & Rich, 2018 ; European Commission, 2018 ). Each misses the entire synergy of historical and cultural causation, and therefore will not likely achieve the curative ends for which they aim. The problems viewed from a critical perspective are not all acknowledged from other perspectives, and thus lead to very different calls for change.

Techno-curative solutions respond to the perceived problem of filter bubbles and fake news circulation (misinformed citizens), calling for AI tagging and suppression of false information. These problematizations and solutions overlook that the marketing structure of social media veers toward birds-of-a-feather networks, easier for big data analysis to aggregate (construct) into markets. The bracketed ethics of attentional capitalism are overlooked, and the general structure is unlikely to be overcome. Getting attention has apparently inspired fact-checking organizations to use infotaining categories of evaluation. When they rate statements as lies (“pants on fire”! or “five Pinocchios”!) but cannot prove deliberate statement of falsehood instead of inaccuracy or bullshit, they paradoxically undermine their purported task (pointing again to the informational and attentional embeddedness in capitalism) and may simply trigger the stubborn ire of those citizens they aim to correct. Techno-curative solutions in AI also overlook the problem that many people distrust the service providers to be truth arbiters, and this is even more the case when companies like Facebook attempt to “team up” with already extant fact-checking businesses ( Snopes.com or the Washington Post , for example, or Le Monde ’s “ Décodeurs ” in France) (“Voters Don’t Trust,” 2016 ). These brands are already ideologically contaminated, distrusted. Unless widely perceived partisan providers are to team up with more mainstream old “trustee journalism” organizations, the victims of disinformation are unlikely to see the debunking (because of customized content) or trust the post’s AI tag. Posts would have to be suppressed, raising concerns of freedom of speech in countries like the United States (Fisher, 2017 ). While experiments on cognitive bias are hopeful that misinformed users gradually change opinion and perception with repeated exposure to debunkings, these experiments do not account for the fact that the structure of the attention economy is, again, not one aimed at microtargeting repeated debunkings. The debunker (trusted/distrusted) is also crucial—who do people trust with such a role, seeing as how they are distrustful of most macro-truth-tellers ?

Finally, deceptive forms of PT communication are built into the culture of liberal democracy, mediatized and dependent on highly professional strategists and practices. Few diagnoses consider this problem, and thus solutions will likely overlook and reproduce different versions of PT. Relatedly, strategic political communication produces PT forms that elude easy logical-positivist-type judgments of true or false, because they are often deliberately ambiguous. This means they require longer cognitive and critical analyses to explain what interpretations are more in accord with facts and which more errant—who is trusted enough to fulfill this role? Given the attention economy, who will engage with this necessarily longer and patience-demanding content?

A recent report by academics and journalists, sponsored by the European Union, touches upon what have become common policy recommendations (one can imply their diagnoses of cause from these proposed solutions):

1. enhance transparency of online news, involving an adequate and privacy-compliant sharing of data about the systems that enable their circulation online; 2. promote media and information literacy to counter disinformation and help users navigate the digital media environment; 3. develop tools for empowering users and journalists to tackle disinformation and foster a positive engagement with fast-evolving information technologies; 4. safeguard the diversity and sustainability of the European news media ecosystem. (European Commission, 2018 )

Compare their solutions to these alternatives, which follow from the critical PT theory articulated in this article.

If one bears in mind the fact that majorities of citizens in many countries report that they distrust news media, corporations, government, democracy, capitalism and other major institutions and traditional accepted sacred organizing discourses of social life, at the most fundamental level “fixing” PT would first of all mean recovering social trust by radically transforming:

consumer capitalism (propelled by PT communication strategies and tactics—promotional culture) and its deep mediatization in an attention economy, since the latter must be made to serve ends beyond attention capture and data harvesting for marketing, i.e. corporate profit and state surveillance;

journalism’s slide into PT infotainment, even when ostensibly trying to extinguish PT via (infotaining and polarizing rhetoric of) fact-checking; and a debate about how it should be financed and what it can and should do under current conditions of communication and culture;

the unequal resources of professional political communication used to study, quantify, construct, and control pseudopublics instead of turning such communication channels and tools over to more democratic actors, albeit with strong emphasis on ethics;

education, teaching the history of anti-democratic elite forces that from the onset of mass communication commandeered scientific knowledges, immense communication resources, and strategic skills to manipulate and control the demos, with varying degrees of success.

Unlike popular and liberal-academic approaches, critical communication approaches to PT eschew nostalgia for earlier periods of pseudodemocratic opinion and perception management, and aim to avoid reactionary (cloaked in the rhetoric of progressivism) calls to restore liberal democracy, itself catastrophically recuperated by neoliberal failures of growing economic inequality, continual post-colonial exploitation, patriarchal backlashes, and the destruction of the environment. A PT cultural condition generates panics about truth that necessarily misrecognize the deeper origins of the condition. Critical approaches to PT wrestle with PT’s nascent roots in the scene of 20th-century mass democracy/communication and consumer capitalism, while assisting with theory and critique to build a more socially just world.

Acknowledgments

My thanks go to Ergin Bulut and Jack Bratich for conversations that contributed to the development of this article.

Further Reading

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1. In a 2012 Atlantic column, James Fallows covered the emerging claims to the term’s origin. In terms of books, Alterman and Keyes originate the term in 2004.

2. Before Harsin’s attempt to theorize it as periodizing concept with a strong communication component in 2015, the Foucauldian-inflected “regimes of post-truth” in 2015, there is scarcely any academic mention of the term, and no mention of the term in communication and media journals ( Google Scholar ; Communication and Mass Media database, October 15, 2017). The exceptions refer mainly to the South African “Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Between 1994 and 2014, one finds only two instances of “post-truth” in the full text of communication and media journal articles, and they use it loosely, in passing, without defining it (three others use the term but as a construct in experiments about truth and lying), and those refer to the popular uses of the term, especially “post-truth” as Eric Alterman ( 2004 , “post-truth presidency”), Ralph Keyes ( 2004 , “post-truth era”) and Paul Krugman ( 2011 , “post-truth campaign”) use them.

3. One of the most misleading false starts has been to locate PT’s origins in 1980s and 1990s academic theories of postmodernism. Despite some vigorous boxing with the theoretical fads of the 1980s and 1990s, these accounts offer little more than their enduring distaste for the fashion of a bygone era. They document the wide academic fascination with the sprawling body of thought associated with it, but they provide no empirical evidence that it had any major effects on public life, on the way citizens orient themselves to politics and the way journalism and politicians communicate to or with them: a correlation of alleged epistemic relativism a causation does not make (D’Ancona, 2017 ). Post-truth has far more obvious historical and contemporary causes, and more compelling evidence from which one can speculatively theorize.

4. Zelizer ( 2004 ) also offered an important challenge to critical cultural approaches to re-engage with the nuances of journalism’s “god terms”: facts, truth, and objectivity. As this overview shows, there was an increasing attempt to do that.

5. The flow of photographic or audiovisual deceptions since 2000 is impressive, and they range from fake photos about John Kerry with Jane Fonda at Vietnam War protests (Marinucci, 2004 ) to fake photos of Israeli military in its Lebanon conflict in 2006 (“Reuters Toughens Rules,” 2007 ).

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critical thinking

Definition of critical thinking

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Word History

1815, in the meaning defined at sense 1

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Why is critical thinking important?

What do lawyers, accountants, teachers, and doctors all have in common?

What is critical thinking?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines critical thinking as “The objective, systematic, and rational analysis and evaluation of factual evidence in order to form a judgment on a subject, issue, etc.” Critical thinking involves the use of logic and reasoning to evaluate available facts and/or evidence to come to a conclusion about a certain subject or topic. We use critical thinking every day, from decision-making to problem-solving, in addition to thinking critically in an academic context!

Why is critical thinking important for academic success?

You may be asking “why is critical thinking important for students?” Critical thinking appears in a diverse set of disciplines and impacts students’ learning every day, regardless of major.

Critical thinking skills are often associated with the value of studying the humanities. In majors such as English, students will be presented with a certain text—whether it’s a novel, short story, essay, or even film—and will have to use textual evidence to make an argument and then defend their argument about what they’ve read. However, the importance of critical thinking does not only apply to the humanities. In the social sciences, an economics major , for example, will use what they’ve learned to figure out solutions to issues as varied as land and other natural resource use, to how much people should work, to how to develop human capital through education. Problem-solving and critical thinking go hand in hand. Biology is a popular major within LAS, and graduates of the biology program often pursue careers in the medical sciences. Doctors use critical thinking every day, tapping into the knowledge they acquired from studying the biological sciences to diagnose and treat different diseases and ailments.

Students in the College of LAS take many courses that require critical thinking before they graduate. You may be asked in an Economics class to use statistical data analysis to evaluate the impact on home improvement spending when the Fed increases interest rates (read more about real-world experience with Datathon ). If you’ve ever been asked “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?”, you may find yourself thinking about the Roman Empire more than you thought—maybe in an English course, where you’ll use text from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra to make an argument about Roman imperial desire.  No matter what the context is, critical thinking will be involved in your academic life and can take form in many different ways.

The benefits of critical thinking in everyday life

Building better communication.

One of the most important life skills that students learn as early as elementary school is how to give a presentation. Many classes require students to give presentations, because being well-spoken is a key skill in effective communication. This is where critical thinking benefits come into play: using the skills you’ve learned, you’ll be able to gather the information needed for your presentation, narrow down what information is most relevant, and communicate it in an engaging way. 

Typically, the first step in creating a presentation is choosing a topic. For example, your professor might assign a presentation on the Gilded Age and provide a list of figures from the 1870s—1890s to choose from. You’ll use your critical thinking skills to narrow down your choices. You may ask yourself:

• What figure am I most familiar with?
• Who am I most interested in? 
• Will I have to do additional research? 

After choosing your topic, your professor will usually ask a guiding question to help you form a thesis: an argument that is backed up with evidence. Critical thinking benefits this process by allowing you to focus on the information that is most relevant in support of your argument. By focusing on the strongest evidence, you will communicate your thesis clearly.

Finally, once you’ve finished gathering information, you will begin putting your presentation together. Creating a presentation requires a balance of text and visuals. Graphs and tables are popular visuals in STEM-based projects, but digital images and graphics are effective as well. Critical thinking benefits this process because the right images and visuals create a more dynamic experience for the audience, giving them the opportunity to engage with the material.

Presentation skills go beyond the classroom. Students at the University of Illinois will often participate in summer internships to get professional experience before graduation. Many summer interns are required to present about their experience and what they learned at the end of the internship. Jobs frequently also require employees to create presentations of some kind—whether it’s an advertising pitch to win an account from a potential client, or quarterly reporting, giving a presentation is a life skill that directly relates to critical thinking. 

Fostering independence and confidence

An important life skill many people start learning as college students and then finessing once they enter the “adult world” is how to budget. There will be many different expenses to keep track of, including rent, bills, car payments, and groceries, just to name a few! After developing your critical thinking skills, you’ll put them to use to consider your salary and budget your expenses accordingly. Here’s an example:

• You earn a salary of $75,000 a year. Assume all amounts are before taxes.
• 1,800 x 12 = 21,600
• 75,000 – 21,600 = 53,400
• This leaves you with $53,400
• 320 x 12 = 3,840 a year
• 53,400-3,840= 49,560
• 726 x 12 = 8,712
• 49,560 – 8,712= 40,848
• You’re left with $40,848 for miscellaneous expenses. You use your critical thinking skills to decide what to do with your $40,848. You think ahead towards your retirement and decide to put $500 a month into a Roth IRA, leaving $34,848. Since you love coffee, you try to figure out if you can afford a daily coffee run. On average, a cup of coffee will cost you $7. 7 x 365 = $2,555 a year for coffee. 34,848 – 2,555 = 32,293
• You have $32,293 left. You will use your critical thinking skills to figure out how much you would want to put into savings, how much you want to save to treat yourself from time to time, and how much you want to put aside for emergency funds. With the benefits of critical thinking, you will be well-equipped to budget your lifestyle once you enter the working world.

Enhancing decision-making skills

Choosing the right university for you.

One of the biggest decisions you’ll make in your life is what college or university to go to. There are many factors to consider when making this decision, and critical thinking importance will come into play when determining these factors.

Many high school seniors apply to colleges with the hope of being accepted into a certain program, whether it’s biology, psychology, political science, English, or something else entirely. Some students apply with certain schools in mind due to overall rankings. Students also consider the campus a school is set in. While some universities such as the University of Illinois are nestled within college towns, New York University is right in Manhattan, in a big city setting. Some students dream of going to large universities, and other students prefer smaller schools. The diversity of a university’s student body is also a key consideration. For many 17- and 18-year-olds, college is a time to meet peers from diverse racial and socio-economic backgrounds and learn about life experiences different than one’s own.

With all these factors in mind, you’ll use critical thinking to decide which are most important to you—and which school is the right fit for you.

Develop your critical thinking skills at the University of Illinois

At the University of Illinois, not only will you learn how to think critically, but you will put critical thinking into practice. In the College of LAS, you can choose from 70+ majors where you will learn the importance and benefits of critical thinking skills. The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at U of I offers a wide range of undergraduate and graduate programs in life, physical, and mathematical sciences; humanities; and social and behavioral sciences. No matter which program you choose, you will develop critical thinking skills as you go through your courses in the major of your choice. And in those courses, the first question your professors may ask you is, “What is the goal of critical thinking?” You will be able to respond with confidence that the goal of critical thinking is to help shape people into more informed, more thoughtful members of society.

With such a vast representation of disciplines, an education in the College of LAS will prepare you for a career where you will apply critical thinking skills to real life, both in and outside of the classroom, from your undergraduate experience to your professional career. If you’re interested in becoming a part of a diverse set of students and developing skills for lifelong success, apply to LAS today!

Read more first-hand stories from our amazing students at the LAS Insider blog .

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