what is critical thinking in psychology

what is critical thinking in psychology

Critical Thinking in Psychology

1. Introduction to Critical Thinking

For students who are encountering psychology through what would be a conventional textbook, learning may seem a bit dry or unrelated to their lives. Fortunately, the internet has drastically changed the psychology instruction landscape. Today, students and instructors selecting an introduction to psychology text have a broad array of resources to choose from. From multimedia-rich e-books, websites, and custom publishing options, ancillary materials are creating a dynamic, interactive supplement to text material. This is good news for teaching and learning psychology. These resources can be incorporated into a course to bring material to life and illustrate relevance to students’ lives. However, one must exercise caution—the quality cannot be taken for granted. It is essential to evaluate the correctness of the material and the strength of the evidence it supplies. This is where critical thinking skills become important. Oftentimes, it is taken for granted that students will automatically figure out how to learn from a text and assess its credibility. Unfortunately, this is far from the case. Many students do not possess the natural curiosity, self-direction, and skepticism needed to excel at learning from text and media. Yet psychologically, there is a strong tendency to accept information as truth if it is presented in a confident manner (Dunning, Heath, & Suls, 2004). The key is how to teach these skills in a palatable manner, and that is where this essay hopes to help.

2. Importance of Critical Thinking in Psychology

The most important information economy resource is the human brain. If the jobs of the knowledge economy are to be done well, they will require thinking and problem-solving, judgment and decision-making, analysis and interpretation. These are critical thinking applications. The quality of what we do in the future will depend on the quality of our thinking. Further, it is not humanly possible to think well in all situations. When things are complicated and there are many interrelated stages to a process, human thinking tends to be fuzzy and error-prone, and attempts to optimally guide and adapt thinking to the requirements of a task at hand are often overridden by suboptimal established habits. In essence, good thinking is expected to become more the exception than the rule, and thinking is needed to analyze why our attempts are unsuccessful.

Critical thinking is a domain-general thinking skill. The ability to think clearly and rationally is important whatever we choose to do. If you work in education, research, finance, management, or the legal profession, then critical thinking is obviously important. But critical thinking skills are not restricted to a particular subject area. Being able to think well and solve problems systematically is an asset for any career. Critical thinking is very important in the new knowledge economy. The global knowledge economy is driven by information and technology. One has to be able to deal with changes quickly and effectively.

3. Key Elements of Critical Thinking in Psychology

Criteria for critical thinking are not best thought of as a fixed list of points. Instead, the criteria should be seen as principles that can be learnt, developed and then applied from an initial process of thinking which can be relatively loosely structured. Instead, what might be very useful is to consider that critical thinking is an iterative process. This means that critical thinking can be considered as having various successive phases. Using the core critical thinking skills in psychology, therefore, involves considering what each of these words or phrases mean. Critical thinking is a process that is well interpreted using a model that best details the steps of reasoning, and also aligns the logic of the thinking process with the standards of critical thinking. With critical thinking being an important skill in psychology, and generally, reasoning and analysis being well documented in critical thinking standards, perhaps the most useful model for these skills is one that has been developed specifically for teaching critical thinking in psychology, and also for evaluating psychological reasoning and critical thinking. An exemplar of such a model has been developed in a textbook providing a detailed guide to logical reasoning and decision making in psychology. Here, a six-step model for critical thinking has been produced. This model involves clarifying the thinking involved, asking important questions, assessing underlying assumptions, weighting the quality and relevance of information, coming to well-reasoned conclusions, and taking thinking to the next level. Using this model to understand the process of critical thinking, and the application of critical skills can aid the teaching and learning of critical thinking in psychology at both an individual skill level, and also in the broader critical thinking competency. An important feature of this model is that it can be used to explain how the same skill can be both more or less sophisticated. It also serves as a somewhat objective criteria to gauge critical thinking competency, providing a means by which to evaluate and improve both student and educator critical thinking skills. Going through this process of reasoning and self-evaluation of thinking using the above model can be best understood using a plan analysis tool or verbal protocol analysis. With the nature of critical thinking being self-evaluation at every level of its application, and an educator being able to use the core skill set to critically evaluate the arguments of others, the same applied process can be used to improve both the critical thinking and reasoning skills of students and educators alike. A comprehensive guide to the skills and implementation of an evaluation and improvement process comes from an article in the Teaching of Psychology journal. In this article, and a later replication, plan analysis or self-verbalization using concurrent or retrospective methods is recommended as a means to critically evaluate and develop a student’s thinking and problem-solving skills; these skills being essentially that of critical thinking. From the assessment of simple everyday tasks to complex problem-solving, it involves breaking down a thought process or completed task and evaluating the decision logic and quality of the information used at each step. Here it can also be seen that more advanced critical thinking and reasoning skills are those used in more complex decision-making and problem-solving tasks. Self-evaluation and the evaluation of others using this protocol provide a metacognitive approach to the evaluation and improvement of specific critical thinking skills.

4. Developing Critical Thinking Skills in Psychology

An exercise described by Rawson (1950) may be useful here. Students are asked to write out a statement on a personally important issue. This statement is kept private and is not shown to anyone at any time. Students are then asked to produce another statement on the same issue, but this time it must be a statement of fact, truth or knowledge. This second statement is avowedly public and is subject to examination and criticism by anyone. The distinction between the two types of statement can form the basis of long-term assignment.

One thing we can encourage students to do is to distinguish between their private desires, what they would like to believe is true; and beliefs based on evaluation of evidence, what the research findings support. Psychology students (and lecturers) are no different from anyone else in having personal beliefs which they do not wish to relinquish, and in using a variety of thinking strategies to protect these beliefs from would-be assailants, contradictory information and cognitive dissonance. But if we can encourage students to value truth seeking and to be committed to the principle of knowing what is really the case based on hard evidence, then they have a motivation to engage in critical thinking about all important aspects of their lives. This is a long and difficult process which is probably not completely attainable, but it is the essence of scientific thinking and the attempt has implications for personal and intellectual development.

Students often do not find it easy to change their views about the world or how it operates. We are likely to be committed to a range of beliefs and opinions about topical issues, family, community and lifestyle, religious or spiritual issues, and perhaps beliefs about what life will be like in the future. We might also hold deep beliefs about particular issues raised in psychology, and students can often find it difficult to engage in critical evaluation of theory and evidence which contradicts their own beliefs.

5. Application of Critical Thinking in Psychological Research

Thinking critically is more valuable than critical thinking understood only as higher order thinking. The goal of the research reported is to provide a comprehensive meta-analytic review of the effectiveness of instruction intended to foster critical thinking in psychology. Critical thinking is a desirable competency for contemporary psychologists. It is an essential part of the process of conducting an investigation, an important aspect of thinking reflectively about psychology. Just as psychology’s investigation of behavior and mental processes is essential to inform the teaching of psychology, a logical line of instruction dictates that educators should seek evidence on the effectiveness of their pedagogical techniques. The evidence of the worth of this endeavor for the teaching of psychology will be beneficial to its practitioners on at least two counts. First, the meta-analytic findings will inform recommendations to readers on how to decide whether or not to consider implementing specific techniques. Second, in revealing general patterns of efficacy of the various techniques, the findings can guide development of a curriculum for training in critical thinking. It is the view of the investigators and the authors that instruction in critical thinking should involve hands-on problem-solving thinking skills whereby students must apply the skills in consideration to solve a specific problem, apply the skills to a particular issue involving a specific social context, and reflect on their general problem-solving abilities. Instruction should be designed to develop students’ abilities to draw reasonable conclusions about what is believed based on the evidence, a most basic critical thinking skill. In teaching philosophy, the Socratic method is defined as “a method of guided discovery where teacher and student engage in a dialogue to clarify values, where the student uncovers errors in thought and where, in some cases, the student revises a concept.” Considering that this is one way of thinking reflectively, it might be most conducive to training the skills through teaching implementation and evaluation of a system of instruction, where assignments could serve as specific problems to solve.