8 critical thinking guidelines psychology

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Eight Critical Thinking Guidelines in Psychology

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Like students in many disciplines, psychology students are often encouraged to practice critical thinking when participating in class discussion, writing an assignment or taking an exam. Fortunately, critical thinking for psychology students can be condensed to eight guidelines. As Carol Tarvis points out, these guidelines are exactly what their name implies; they are not hard and fast rules, nor is any set of guidelines the only possible set.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking should not be confused with various types of logic, although it does incorporate principles of logic. Although it is related to the scientific method, it differs in that it is applicable to all disciplines. In short, critical thinking involves gathering information, looking at it objectively and reaching an objective conclusion, with an added element of metacognition, or the ability to deconstruct the thinking process to understand where logic may have gone wrong. In other words, it involves thinking about how we think.

When using critical thinking in psychology, the first guideline is to ask good questions. Good questions are those that are open-ended and are designed to test the current limits of knowledge. Questions with "yes" or "no" answers will not do this effectively. In the realm of psychology, a good question would be something like this: "What causes an ear worm, or the phenomenon of a song's melody getting caught in a person's head?" The next step or guideline is to define your scope and narrow your terms so that you are avoiding subjective terms like "happiness" and "sadness." Then you should begin gathering evidence, which could include research into published literature, surveys, interviews, and even raw data.

Introspection

When gathering evidence, you should be aware of currency, reliability and bias -- the fourth guideline. By the same token, you need to be aware of your own biases during the research and hypothesis stages of your investigation. If you are a bass player or drummer, it might be tempting to hypothesize that a good rhythm track is what makes a song melody stick in a person's head, but this may not be correct. To be objective, you need to use the practices of empiricism; like a good scientist, you will have to dispassionately observe and take notes, with a willingness to consider evidence that contradicts your thesis. Along the same lines, you should avoid emotional reasoning, which is the fifth guideline.

Logical Conclusions

While you are looking to present a strong and logical argument, it is good to practice the sixth guideline -- avoiding oversimplification for the sake of winning the argument. In other words, you must learn to think beyond generalizations and sometimes reject obvious or overly simplistic thinking. The next step in critical thinking is the consideration of other interpretations and other answers. While doing your research, you likely found alternative explanations, and perhaps during your original research using surveys, experiments and interviews you ran into subjects who did not fit neatly into your hypothesis. To exercise critical thinking in psychology, you have to take all of this into account.

Revise If Necessary

The eighth and final guideline is to welcome uncertainty. Not all hypotheses can be proven. You have an equal chance to disprove or prove your argument, so you may need to modify your hypothesis or research methods to accommodate the data you collect. You may discover that you simply do not have all the answers or that you are missing critical data, such as information that only electroencephalography (EEG) can provide. In short, you may have to accept the fact that you can only argue probabilities, not certainties.

Anthony Fonseca is the library director at Elms College in Massachusetts. He has a doctorate in English and has taught various writing courses and literature survey courses. His books include readers' advisory guides, pop culture encyclopedias and academic librarianship studies.

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On Critical Thinking

Several years ago some teaching colleagues were talking about the real value of teaching psychology students to think critically. After some heated discussion, the last word was had by a colleague from North Carolina. “The real value of being a good critical thinker in psychology is so you won’t be a jerk,” he said with a smile. That observation remains one of my favorites in justifying why teaching critical thinking skills should be an important goal in psychology. However, I believe it captures only a fraction of the real value of teaching students to think critically about behavior.

What I s Critical Thinking?

Although there is little agreement about what it means to think critically in psychology, I like the following broad definition: The propensity and skills to engage in activity with reflec tive skepticism focused on deciding what to believe or do

Students often arrive at their first introductory course with what they believe is a thorough grasp of how life works. After all, they have been alive for at least 18 years, have witnessed their fair shares of crisis, joy, and tragedy, and have successfully navigated their way in to your classroom.

These students have had a lot of time to develop their own personal theories about how the world works and most are quite satisfied with the results. They often pride themselves on how good they are with people as well as how astute they are in understanding and explaining the motives of others. And they think they know what psychology is. Many are surprised- and sometimes disappointed- to discover that psychology is a science, and the rigor of psychological research is a shock. The breadth and depth of psychology feel daunting. Regardless of their sophistication in the discipline, students often are armed with a single strategy to survive the experience: Memorize the book and hope it works out on the exam. In many cases, this strategy will serve them well. Unfortunately, student exposure to critical thinking skill development may be more accidental than planful on the part of most teachers. Collaboration in my department and with other colleagues over the years has persuaded me that we need to approach critical thinking skills in a purposeful, systematic, and developmental manner from the introductory course through the capstone experience, propose that we need to teach critical thinking skills in three domains of psychology: practical (the “jerk avoidance” function), theoretical (developing scientific explanations for behavior), and methodological (testing scientific ideas). I will explore each of these areas and then offer some general suggestions about how psychology teachers can improve their purposeful pursuit of critical thinking objectives.

Practical Domain

Practical critical thinking is often expressed as a long-term, implicit goal of teachers of psychology, even though they may not spend much academic time teaching how to transfer critical thinking skills to make students wise consumers, more careful judges of character, or more cautious interpreters of behavior. Accurate appraisal of behavior is essential, yet few teachers invest time in helping students understand how vulnerable their own interpretations are to error.

Encourage practice in accurate description and interpretation of behavior by presenting students with ambiguous behavior samples. Ask them to distinguish what they observe (What is the behavior?) from the inferences they draw from the behavior (What is the meaning of the behavior?). I have found that cartoons, such as Simon Bond’s Uns p eakable Acts, can be a good resource for refining observation skills. Students quickly recognize that crisp behavioral descriptions are typically consistent from observer to observer, but inferences vary wildly. They recognize that their interpretations are highly personal and sometimes biased by their own values and preferences. As a result of experiencing such strong individual differences in interpretation, students may learn to be appropriately less confident of their immediate conclusions, more tolerant of ambiguity, and more likely to propose alternative explanations. As they acquire a good understanding of scientific procedures, effective control techniques, and legitimate forms of evidence, they may be less likely to fall victim to the multitude of off-base claims about behavior that confront us all. (How many Elvis sightings can be valid in one year?)

Theoretical Domain

Theoretical critical thinking involves helping the student develop an appreciation for scientific explanations of behavior. This means learning not just the content of psychology but how and why psychology is organized into concepts, principles, laws, and theories. Developing theoretical skills begins in the introductory course where the primary critical thinking objective is understanding and applying concepts appropriately. For example, when you introduce students to the principles of reinforcement, you can ask them to find examples of the principles in the news or to make up stories that illustrate the principles.

Mid-level courses in the major require more sophistication, moving students beyond application of concepts and principles to learning and applying theories. For instance, you can provide a rich case study in abnormal psychology and ask students to make sense of the case from different perspectives, emphasizing theoretical flexibility or accurate use of existing and accepted frameworks in psychology to explain patterns of behavior. In advanced courses we can justifiably ask students to evaluate theory, selecting the most useful or rejecting the least helpful. For example, students can contrast different models to explain drug addiction in physiological psychology. By examining the strengths and weaknesses of existing frameworks, they can select which theories serve best as they learn to justify their criticisms based on evidence and reason.

Capstone, honors, and graduate courses go beyond theory evaluation to encourage students to create theory. Students select a complex question about behavior (for example, identifying mechanisms that underlie autism or language acquisition) and develop their own theory-based explanations for the behavior. This challenge requires them to synthesize and integrate existing theory as well as devise new insights into the behavior.

Methodological Domain

Most departments offer many opportunities for students to develop their methodological critical thinking abilities by applying different research methods in psychology. Beginning students must first learn what the scientific method entails. The next step is to apply their understanding of scientific method by identifying design elements in existing research. For example, any detailed description of an experimental design can help students practice distinguishing the independent from the dependent variable and identifying how researchers controlled for alternative explanations. The next methodological critical thinking goals include evaluating the quality of existing research design and challenging the conclusions of research findings. Students may need to feel empowered by the teacher to overcome the reverence they sometimes demonstrate for anything in print, including their textbooks. Asking students to do a critical analysis on a fairly sophisticated design may simply be too big a leap for them to make. They are likely to fare better if given examples of bad design so they can build their critical abilities and confidence in order to tackle more sophisticated designs. (Examples of bad design can be found in The Critical Thinking Companion for Introductory Psychology or they can be easily constructed with a little time and imagination). Students will develop and execute their own research designs in their capstone methodology courses. Asking students to conduct their own independent research, whether a comprehensive survey on parental attitudes, a naturalistic study of museum patrons’ behavior, or a well-designed experiment on paired associate learning, prompts students to integrate their critical thinking skills and gives them practice with conventional writing forms in psychology. In evaluating their work I have found it helpful to ask students to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their own work- as an additional opportunity to think critically-before giving them my feedback.

Additional Suggestions

Adopting explicit critical thinking objectives, regardless of the domain of critical thinking, may entail some strategy changes on the part of the teacher.

• Introduce psychology as an ope n-end ed, growing enterprise . Students often think that their entry into the discipline represents an end-point where everything good and true has already been discovered. That conclusion encourages passivity rather than criticality. Point out that research is psychology’ s way of growing and developing. Each new discovery in psychology represents a potentially elegant act of critical thinking. A lot of room for discovery remains. New ideas will be developed and old conceptions discarded.

• Require student performance that goes beyond memorization . Group work, essays, debates, themes, letters to famous psychologists, journals, current event examples- all of these and more can be used as a means of developing the higher skills involved in critical thinking in psychology. Find faulty cause-effect conclusions in the tabloids (e.g., “Eating broccoli increases your IQ!”) and have students design studies to confirm or discredit the headline’s claims. Ask students to identify what kinds of evidence would warrant belief in commercial claims. Although it is difficult, even well designed objective test items can capture critical thinking skills so that students are challenged beyond mere repetition and recall.

• Clarify your expectations about performance with explicit, public criteria. Devising clear performance criteria for psychology projects will enhance student success. Students often complain that they don’t understand “what you want” when you assign work. Performance criteria specify the standards that you will use to evaluate their work. For example, perfonnance criteria for the observation exercise described earlier might include the following: The student describes behavior accurately; offers i nference that is reasonable for the context; and identifies personal factors that might influence infer ence. Perfonnance criteria facilitate giving detailed feedback easily and can also promote student self-assessment.

• Label good examples of critical thinking when these occur spontaneously. Students may not recognize when they are thinking critically. When you identify examples of good thinking or exploit examples that could be improved, it enhances students’ ability to understand. One of my students made this vivid for me when she commented on the good connection she had made between a course concept and an insight from her literature class, “That is what you mean by critical thinking?” There after I have been careful to label a good critical thinking insight.

• Endorse a questioning attitude. Students often assume that if they have questions about their reading, then they are somehow being dishonorable, rude, or stupid. Having  discussions early in the course about the role of good questions in enhancing the quality of the subject and expanding the sharpness of the mind may set a more critical stage on which students can play. Model critical thinking from some insights you have had about behavior or from some research you have conducted in the past. Congratulate students who offer good examples of the principles under study. Thank students who ask concept-related questions and describe why you think their questions are good. Leave time and space for more. Your own excitement about critical thinking can be a great incentive for students to seek that excitement.

• Brace yourself . When you include more opportunity for student critical thinking in class, there is much more opportunity for the class to go astray. Stepping away from the podium and engaging the students to perform what they know necessitates some loss of control, or at least some enhanced risk. However, the advantage is that no class will ever feel completely predictable, and this can be a source of stimulation for students and the professor as well.

As far back as I can remember over 50 yrs. ago. I have been talking psychology to friends, or helping them to solve problems. I never thought about psy. back then, but now I realize I really love helping people. How can I become a critical thinker without condemning people?

using a case study explain use of critical thinking in counseling process.

Do you have any current readings with Critical Thinking Skills in Psychology, besides John Russcio’s work?

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About the Author

Jane Halonen received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1980. She is Professor of Psychology at Alverno College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she has served as Chair of Psychology and Dean of the Behavior Sciences Department. Halonen is past president of the Council for Teachers of Undergraduate Psychology. A fellow of APA's Division 2 (Teaching), she has been active on the Committee of Undergraduate Education, helped design the 1991 APA Conference on Undergraduate Educational Quality, and currently serves as a committee member to develop standards for the teaching of high school psychology.

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10.9: Key Guidelines for Critical Decision Making

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From their textbook, Psychology 12th edition, Carole Wade, Carol Tavris and AlanSwinkels list some important and useful guidelines for critical decision-making.

Ask questions; be willing to wonder . Always be on the lookout for questions that have not been answered by the experts in the field or by the media. Be willing to ask “What’s wrong here?’ and/or “Why is this the way it is,” and “How did it come to be that way?”

Define the problem . An inadequate formulation of a question can produce misleading or incomplete answers. Ask neutral questions that don’t presuppose answers.

What evidence supports or refutes this argument and its opposition? Just because many people believe, including so-called experts, it doesn’t make it so.

Analyze assumptions and biases . All of us are subject to biases, beliefs that prevent us from being impartial. Evaluate the assumptions and biases that lie behind the arguments, including your own.

Control emotional reasoning . “If I feel this way, it must be true.” Passionate commitment to a view can motivate a person to think boldly without fear of what others will say, but when “gut feelings” replace clear thinking, the results can be disastrous.

Don’t oversimplify . Look beyond the obvious, rest easy generalizations, and reject either/or thinking. Don’t argue solely by anecdote.

Consider other interpretations . Formulate hypotheses that offer reasonable explanations of characteristics, behavior, and events.

Tolerate uncertainty . Sometimes the evidence merely allows us to draw tentative conclusions. Don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t know.” Don’t demand “the answer.” 1

• Wade, Carol and Carol Tavris and Alan Swinkels. Psychology. Boston: Pearson, 2017.

5 Rules for Better Thinking

Critical ignoring, the janusian process, and more..

By Psychology Today Contributors published January 2, 2024 - last reviewed on January 9, 2024

1. To Make Better Choices, Consider New Menus

By Karolina Lempert, Ph.D.

Which do you prefer, McDonald’s or Chick-fil-A?

Before answering, you probably evaluated each of these fast-food chains according to your own tastes and cravings, compared them, and then chose the one with a higher value for you. This is exactly the kind of question you might be asked if you were a participant in a study on value-based decision-making . There has been a lot of progress in the science of how we evaluate and choose between well-defined alternatives, and much of the research on the topic would lead us to believe that we go about our days deciding between choices like options on a menu.

And yet, most of our decisions are not like that at all; they are open-ended. When deciding how to respond to an insult, we are not presented a piece of paper with two well-crafted retorts on it from which we can choose A or B. More often, such as when deciding how to spend a weekend evening, we first must mentally generate a range of options, a process that is crucially important for making choices.

For example, a 2021 study showed that people are much more likely to think of McDonald’s than Chick-fil-A when asked to name a fast-food chain and therefore more likely to reply, “McDonald’s,” when asked the open-ended question, “What’s your favorite fast-food chain?” However, in the same study, more people chose Chick-fil-A over McDonald’s when presented with an exhaustive list of chains and asked to choose their favorite from the set. Since we don’t carry around such lists in real life, we may end up eating at McDonald’s more often simply because it comes to mind more easily.

This suggests that what comes to mind has a huge impact on our choices—and that we may end up with something less satisfying simply because we didn’t think of something better in the moment.

Where Common and Good Meet

Researchers studying what kinds of options do tend to pop into our minds have found that they’re a combination of what is common and what is good. In a 2020 study, participants were asked to enter the first number that came to mind in response to different general prompts, such as “number of hours of TV for a person to watch in a day” or “percent of students who cheat on high school exams.” A separate group got the same prompts but was asked what the ideal number was, and another group was asked what they thought the average number was. Across the board, the researchers found, the numbers that came to mind for those asked the more open questions were a blend of those ideal and average numbers.

It makes sense for things that are most common to come to mind more easily, but this finding that things that are valuable, or ideal, also come to mind easily is novel. It suggests that we might prioritize remembering good things so that we can seek them out again later. It also implies that things we already like are apt to get chosen again, which might help explain why many humans are not great at considering new things.

Of course, in most situations choosing things that are generally good is fine; sometimes, we don’t want or need to put in the effort to generate a bunch of options before we make a decision. But if we consistently rely only on what comes to mind immediately and don’t take a moment to consider alternatives, we can miss out on some great opportunities.

The next time you go online to order dinner, scan a bit to make sure you are considering all of the options. To buy a gift, stroll around the mall first instead of just ordering from the same website you repeatedly use. Our memories are efficient, but they are also limited; if we create or seek out fresh menus before we make decisions, we might end up happier.

Karolina Lempert, Ph.D. , is an assistant professor of psychology at Adelphi University.

2. For Better Plans, Think Backward

By Eva Krockow, Ph.D.

Have you ever played the 21 game? Starting at 0, two players take turns adding 1, 2, or 3 to the total. The game ends when the sum of the added numbers reaches or surpasses 21, and the player forced to make the final move loses.

Sounds tricky, but what if I told you that it’s possible to win in a single move? Imagine the first player begins by adding 3 to the starting value of 0. Now it’s your turn, and if you choose strategically, you could set yourself up for a sequence of optimal choices, ultimately forcing the other player to hit 21. The solution lies in the decision-making approach called backward induction, which starts by considering the end of a problem and then works backward in time to arrive at an optimal approach for the beginning.

Imagine again that you are trying to decide on a move following your opponent’s initial choice of 3. Rather than considering only the immediate situation, backward induction would involve considering the game’s end first. Both players want to avoid reaching 21. This can be achieved by being the player who reaches 20, because then the next player’s choice must take them to 21.

How can you be sure to be that winning player? Take another step backward and you’ll see that the only certain way is to reach 16 in your penultimate move, because no matter the other person’s subsequent choice, the highest value they could reach is 19, thus allowing you to move to 20 on the following turn.

And how can you be sure to be the player who calls 16? Be the one to call 12. Working all the way back to the start of the game, backward induction leaves you with a clear solution: To win, reach a multiple of 4 with each move, guaranteeing that you’ll ultimately be able to call 20. Following your opponent’s initial choice of 3, then, your optimal response would be to add 1.

Backward induction is not simple. It relies on analytical thinking and perspective-taking , or the ability to imagine your situation at a later point in time. Psychologists have researched the skill using carefully designed puzzles and games to measure people’s analytical thinking. Their studies show that trained individuals and analytical thinking experts, such as competitive chess players, make frequent use of backward induction, but that most lay people either do not realize the strategy exists or aren’t motivated enough, or able, to perform more than one or two steps of backward reasoning. Hence, a case can be made that backward induction should be promoted or taught more widely.

Backward Induction in Real Life

Backward induction can be applied to many decision-making scenarios in which the outcome relies on a series of interdependent choices. A good example of this was portrayed on the sitcom Friends when Rachel’s 30th birthday prompted her to reflect on her future and specifically how she could achieve her goal of becoming a mother of three.

Reasoning backward, Rachel determines that she’d have to have her first child by age 35, meaning she’d have to get pregnant by 34. As she considers marriage a prerequisite to having children and wants to be married at least one year prior to getting pregnant, she’d have to marry at 33. Assuming 1.5 years to get to know the guy before her engagement and 1.5 years to plan a wedding, she concludes that that very moment, at age 30, is the time to meet her future husband. Hours later, she breaks up with her boyfriend Tag, six years her junior and not ready for such a commitment.

Rachel’s example illustrates how using a future goal as a reference point allows you to work backward and arrive at the most rational strategy for the present. Backward induction can thus be a helpful method of approaching any long-term goal that might appear unattainable in the moment.

Of course, the whimsical nature of life can render the best plans obsolete. As fans of Friends know, Rachel’s wish for a child became reality much sooner than she intended, albeit in an unexpected way. Still, it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t concluded that she needed to break up with Tag.

Eva Krockow, Ph.D. , is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Leicester.

3. To Manage Overload, Think More Flexibly

By Ellie Xu and Darby Saxbe, Ph.D.

Imagine you’re organizing a dinner party. You’ve spent all day cooking, and you’re excited for your five closest friends to come over so you can catch up on each other’s lives. The table is set, the candles are burning, and the champagne is about to be popped. Then, you get a text: Two guests can’t make it.

How do you respond to your negative feelings? The answer could affect your mental health.

Do you try to see the situation more positively by focusing on feeling grateful for the friends who can still attend? If so, you’re engaging in cognitive reappraisal, or reframing something in a more positive way. Or do you instead ignore, or suppress, those feelings of disappointment or sadness? This is referred to as emotional suppression. Or do you think about all the possible reasons why two of your best friends weren’t able to come to your party, over and over again? This would be rumination.

Cognitive reappraisal, emotional suppression, and rumination are just a few examples of emotion regulation strategies, the techniques people use to manage their emotions. Research shows that certain emotion -regulation strategies may benefit your mental health and well-being more than others. For example, cognitive reappraisal seems to lead to greater well-being and better mental health outcomes, while the opposite is true of emotional suppression and rumination.

When you’re confronted with a situation that is out of your control, like a last-minute dinner party cancellation, cognitive reappraisal is typically most helpful. However, cognitive reappraisal may not be as helpful when you can control the situation. Let’s say you failed a midterm physics exam. You’re feeling sad, and you decide to use cognitive reappraisal to help reframe the situation. You might think, Oh, the midterm exam is only 40 percent of my grade, and my physics grade doesn’t determine the rest of my life. This might all be true, but making yourself feel better about failing the test could lead you to feel less motivated to study hard for the final exam.

Changing your use of emotion regulation strategies in this way, to best fit the needs of the specific situation you face, is known as emotion regulation flexibility.

With this in mind, a research team has developed the idea of a “thinking threshold,” which represents the point past which we’re no longer able to think clearly because we’re experiencing intense negative emotions that impair our thinking, such as feeling overwhelmed, panicky, hopeless, drained, or generally out-of-control sad.

When you’re feeling low, and your thoughts are pushed past your thinking threshold—perhaps because two of your best friends can’t make it to your dinner party—it might be helpful to call on body-focused emotion regulation strategies such as mindfulness meditation and breathing relaxation techniques. Alternatively, behavioral activation strategies could offer relief—engaging in hobbies or activities, like exercise, that make you feel good—until you can think more clearly about managing your negative emotions.

Determining your personal thinking threshold can be tricky and may require trial and error, but when you can recognize that you’ve reached it and have regulation strategies at the ready, your thoughts can support you instead of paralyzing you.

Ellie Xu is a doctoral student in the clinical psychology program at the University of Southern California. Darby Saxbe, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology at USC.

4. To Boost Creativity, Think of Opposites

By Albert Rothenberg, M.D.

Creativity consists of the production of entities that are both new and valuable. The newness is unprecedented, and the value may involve usefulness, precision, or advancement. Creativity is at the core of the most important and far-reaching achievements in art, literature, science, music, business, and other fields. One vital creative strategy is known as the Janusian process, after the multi-faced Roman god Janus, who always looks in diametrically opposed directions. It consists of actively conceiving two or more opposite or contradictory ideas, concepts, or images simultaneously, a conception leading to the production of new identities.

Although seemingly illogical and self-contradictory, creators construct these conceptualizations in rational states of mind in order to produce creative effects. Einstein, for example, described his “happiest thought” in the development of the General Theory of Relativity as his conceiving that a man falling from the roof of a house was both in rest (relatively) and in motion at the same time. Playwright Eugene O’Neill very early conceived the main character of his play The Iceman Cometh , Hickey, as motivated by wishes for his wife to be both faithful and unfaithful at the same time.

Simultaneity of opposites or antitheses is a core feature of the Janusian process. Creators conceive as simultaneously true and not true firmly held propositions about the laws of nature, the functioning of individuals and groups, or the aesthetic properties of visual and sound patterns. Or, both opposite and antithetical propositions are entertained as concurrently operative: A particle spinning is going too fast and too slow at the same time; a chemical is both boiling and freezing; kindness and sadism operate simultaneously. Previously held beliefs or laws are still considered valid, but opposite or antithetical beliefs and laws are formulated as equally operative or valid as well.

These formulations are way stations to creative outcomes. They interact and join with other cognitive and affective developments to produce new and valuable products. The Janusian process initially disrupts pre-existing conceptions. Thinkers like Einstein are sometimes both surprised and gratified when formulating such thoughts, sometimes feeling as if they came out of the blue. The idea that the contradiction or opposite of well-grounded fact, theory, or actuality may be simultaneously valid can seem astounding or inconceivable. In this way, previously held systems of ideas are split apart and broken or even essentially destroyed. This disruption provides for a creative result: the development of something both new and valuable.

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet James Merrill was once home thinking about a past travel incident —a horse had appeared at a lonely desert site—when it occurred to him that horses are animals that “renounce their own kind in order to live our lives.” This idea that horses live human lives, that they are antithetically both beast and not beast and simultaneously human and not human, generated his acclaimed poem, “In Monument Valley,” with its focus on a happy and intense relationship between a young person and a horse, together with their sad, resigned separation.

How It Works

The Janusian process proceeds through four primary phases: 1. the motivation to create; 2. a deviation or separation from usual, accepted notions or procedures; 3. simultaneous opposition or antithesis; and 4. construction of the new theory, discovery, artwork, or practice.

To apply the process, do not simply think in contrasts or “play” with opposites. Make endless lists of opposites, rather than searching for only the pertinent and important ones, or just turn things around or go in some reverse and opposite direction.

Do conceive two or more opposites as true, or theoretically, mechanically, or aesthetically operative at the same time—as, for example, dealing with an adversary in the geopolitical realm with loving hatred or, in the business world, both helping and contending with a competitor at the same time.

Albert Rothenberg, M.D. , is a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

5. To Maintain Focus, Practice Critical Ignoring

By David Ludden, Ph.D.

To think critically, you need to be able to seek out sources of information, read carefully, consider the credibility of those sources, and reason out conclusions on your own. In the days before the internet, critical thinking was the most important cognitive skill that informed citizens could have.

While critical thinking is still important in the digital age, Max Planck Institute of Human Development psychologist Anastasia Kozyreva and her colleagues argue that “critical ignoring” is an even more important skill today. With an overabundance of information, they claim, we need to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff, deciding what’s worth our attention and what isn’t.

For most of our history, we lived in small groups in which emotionally charged information typically signaled threats or opportunities. In that environment, letting our emotions guide our attention was generally a successful strategy. But today, if we clicked on every sensational item on the screen, we’d not only waste a lot of valuable time but also potentially pick up a lot of false information.

To protect ourselves, we need new ways of interacting with information. For Kozyreva and colleagues, that means critical ignoring, a complementary skill to critical thinking in which we intentionally control our environment to reduce exposure to low-quality information.

Critical ignoring, as the research team describes it, involves three strategies:

Self-nudge. To avoid low-quality information and retain more quality time for ourselves, we should aim to remove distracting stimuli from our environment. In this way, critical ignorers are like successful dieters who know it’s easier to avoid unhealthy foods if they just keep them out of their homes. Similarly, if you set up your digital environment with attention-grabbing items kept out of sight, or set time limits for your browsing, you’ll have a better chance of success than if you rely on willpower .

Read laterally. To improve judgment about the credibility of information, open a new tab next to an item to find out more about the source. Many sites have a particular agenda that makes them more interested in influencing than in informing. Their headlines may deceive or even be contrary to the actual facts. A check of the original source should expose them.

Don’t feed the trolls. We all know that there are malicious actors on the internet whose goal is to spread false information and hurtful rumors. It can be tempting to respond to them to try to set the record straight. But trolls don’t care about that. They just care about provoking your emotions, so instead of rewarding them with your attention, ignore or block them.

Critical ignoring is a key component of cognitive functions such as problem-solving and decision-making. When we have too much information, we become overwhelmed, and it’s more likely that irrelevant information will lead us astray. Effective problem-solving and decision-making rely on heuristics , or rules of thumb, that winnow the available information down to manageable chunks so that we can come up with good-enough solutions.

We have more information at our fingertips than ever before. But most of that information is of little value. Worse, a considerable amount of it will just lead our thinking astray. More than a century ago, William James remarked on this point in his Principles of Psychology , writing: “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” This observation is even more pertinent in the information age, when the most vital aspect of critical thinking may be learning what to ignore.

David Ludden, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology and the chair of the department of psychology at Georgia Gwinnett College.

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