critical thinking news articles

Amidst misinformation, critical thinking needs a 21st century upgrade

New book argues that scientific reasoning is a necessity for living in a world shaped by science and tech

By Robert Sanders

UC Berkeley

March 26, 2024

In 2013, the University of California, Berkeley, debuted a course to teach undergraduates the tricks used by scientists to make sense of the world, in the hope that these tricks would prove useful in assessing the claims and counterclaims that bombard us every day.

It was launched by three UC Berkeley professors — a physicist, a philosopher and a psychologist — in response to a world afloat in misinformation and disinformation, where politicians were making policy decisions based on ideas that, if not demonstrably wrong, were at least untested and uncertain.

The class, Sense and Sensibility and Science , was a hit and convinced the professors to write a book based on the class that provides tips not only on how to systematically wade through the noise around us to seek the truth, but also how to work with those holding different values to come to a consensus on how to act.

The book, Third Millennium Thinking: Creating sense in a world of nonsense (Little, Brown, Spark), will be published today, March 26 — just in time for the 2024 election season, which promises to be more bluff and bluster than rational argument.

Courtesy of Little, Brown, Spark

Saul Perlmutter , a Nobel Prize-winning professor of physics and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist, had been discussing the need for an undergraduate course on critical thinking with philosophy professor John Campbell for nearly a year when they both agreed that they needed a third perspective — that of a social psychologist. They approached Robert MacCoun , then a UC Berkeley professor of public policy and law who is now at Stanford Law School, and he was all in.

The three authors will get together to discuss the book at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on Thursday, March 28.

The course, now co-taught with Amy Lerman , UC Berkeley professor of public policy and political science, currently enrolls 300 students for Zoom lectures and additional smaller, in-person discussion sections. Courses based on the UC Berkeley curriculum have been adopted at Harvard University and UC Irvine, and, this spring, by the University of Chicago. A high school course is currently being developed and classroom-tested as well. Berkeley News sat down with Perlmutter, Campbell and MacCoun to discuss the book and why the world needs a science-based approach to critical thinking and decision making.

Berkeley News : Why the need for such a course and your new book?

Saul Perlmutter : There was a period, back in 2012 or thereabouts, when we were watching our government at the time try to make rational decisions, and it just looked so unlike a lunch table conversation among a bunch of scientists. They weren’t using the same vocabulary, the same terms, the same approaches to a problem. At the time, I was thinking, “When did scientists learn this stuff?” I realized it wasn’t in any science course that I had ever taken. It just somehow seemed to be taught by osmosis, by going through research training. So I asked, “Is there any way that we could articulate what those concepts are that scientists were using and taking for granted at the lunch table, and try to teach it to everybody?” That was one of the starting points.

But you know, if you go to a physics faculty meeting, it doesn’t necessarily run much more rationally than any other faculty meeting. We had to bring in other expertise, and the obvious ones were social science and philosophy. Social psychology brought in the idea that when groups get together, they’re not thinking what they think they’re thinking — there are many known failings in individual and group thinking, and ways to do better. And then philosophy brought in all the questions of: How do we weigh different elements of decision-making against each other, topics like how to weave in the values, fears and goals that drive a decision? What is the role of experts in a democracy?”

John Campbell : Saul just rung me out of the blue and said, “Do you want to talk about this?” What came into focus for me in our conversations was how much uncertainty people have about what the place is of science in our society. It often seems, to me anyway, to be regarded as a kind of magic — of course, they can do anything these days. They can put robots into your bloodstream and make you do what they like. The only question is what their motivations are, and what are they up to.

It seems to me that we all need to have more of a sense of what science can do, what its possibilities and limitations are. That scientists can’t just magic up anything, they have techniques we can use ourselves in everyday life.

Rob MacCoun : I was delighted when Saul described this course to me and said, “Would you be interested?” I said, “Absolutely.” I had been doing empirical work on a lot of really hot-button issues — gays in the military and drug legalization, being two of them — and had despaired over the amount of bias in the interpretation and use of research evidence.

Saul Perlmutter : After we had been talking a little bit, we put up a sign saying: Are you embarrassed watching our society make decisions? Come help invent a course, come help save the world. And about 30 students, mostly grad students and postdocs, came forward. We met every week for about nine months. We came up with 23 topics and exercises designed to teach these topics experientially in a way that people could remember them and use them whenever they came across the need, not just in their own field. Over the years, we’ve tried to get as many of those into the course as we could.

BN: In your book you have chapters on many of these topics: how not to confuse correlation with causation; thinking in terms of probability, not certainty; admitting and controlling for your biases; not being afraid to admit you’re wrong. You argue that these aren’t only useful in the sciences.

MacCoun : This is not a book that says, “Here are the most important findings in science.” It’s also not even about the scientific method, although we do teach some of that. It really is about things that are part of science culture that nobody talks about explicitly, habits that people just pick up. It’s not unique to the natural sciences. I think social scientists, partly through imitation, have also learned a lot of those things. That’s because science is a profession where you have to work with people who disagree with you about something, and you can’t just say, “OK, we agree to disagree.” You believe that there actually is an answer out there. And while both sides think they’re more likely to have the right one, they agree there is a right answer to be found. And both sides want to know how: Can we at least get closer to the right answer?

Aditya Ranganathan, UC Berkeley

That original group was mostly from the sciences. We had this workshop for the first summer, just trying to imagine what such a class would look like, trying to come up with exercises. I have to say, that’s the most preparation I’ve ever put into any course I’ve ever taught. But it paid off because the first time we taught it, it was very well received by the students, and we felt like, “Oh, this is something distinctive.”

Saul Perlmutter : I remember at the time I was thinking that these were things that scientists seemed to know, but that most of society did not seem to know. And so maybe we should be teaching non-scientists the material. But then I realized, actually, scientists also need to learn it much younger. I should have learned it as an undergraduate or even as a high school student, not waiting until I learned it by osmosis in graduate school.

Campbell : There’s something about recognizing, as Rob says, that there’s an objective fact that we’re trying to get to. But the flip side of that is recognizing that, OK, we’re finite humans, maybe we can only get to the facts probabilistically. We can put weights on the objective facts, we can say this is far more likely than that, but you always have to accept the possibility of you being in error about those facts. If we could all recognize that however strong a hunch we have that this thing is right, there is always room for error, it would greatly facilitate debate across divides. At the same time, there is something out there, and it’s worth fighting about how we get it right.

MacCoun : If you’re trying to actually solve problems in the world, in the empirical world, science is the best game in town, and it’s got a proven track record. We want this book to be for the general public. We feel evangelical about it — why doesn’t everybody know about this stuff? We hope it will get readers.

BN: Is there something about the current time — the new century and the beginning of the third millennium — that makes this more important now?

Perlmutter : There’s a mix of things that are making this a particularly fertile time for this book. One is, there’s so much information out there that you can’t actually teach science anymore that’s intended to be comprehensive. Once upon a time, most educated people knew most of science, or at least what science was known at the time. But now I think it’s almost impossible. But what you can do is you can teach the elements that go into scientific thinking so that when you go to a YouTube video or read an article, you have some way of judging what’s being done and whether it’s being done in a way that meets these standards of thought.

Steven Zeng and Brian Delahunty, UC Berkeley

Toward the end of the book, Rob and John, I think, captured well the sense in which the world has moved from being very authoritative, where a single person is the genius who makes some discovery, to a world now where there’s a much deeper understanding of how authority is a community process. In some sense, we’re ripe for this. So at the same time that some aspects of societal thinking have broken down lately, other aspects have advanced dramatically, and I think we’ve come to a much better place in understanding how people can figure things out together.

Campbell : Something else that wasn’t here 100 years ago is just the sheer volume of the ways that science is impacting everyday life. I mean, you can’t really do a book on decision-making that’s going to apply at all, really, to most decisions you make without having some sense of where science should be factoring into your decisions. There is practically nothing that is free of some scientific aspect or where science can’t be of some help in decision-making. But you really need a good sense of what the science is about, what its scope and limits are, where you might plug it in, and how it integrates with values.

Perlmutter : We’re not saying, “Give up on experts.” Look carefully at how the experts are presenting and choose your experts well. Choose them based on a self-critical willingness to change their mind and willingness to state things tentatively when necessary or strongly when needed.

Campbell : As humans, we crave certainty. It’s so appealing when politicians express themselves with full conviction about everything. One thing we should be looking for in politicians is that openness to the possibility of error. This is a perplexing and confusing world, and it is so agreeable and comforting when someone says, “I can lead you through all this.” We have to learn not to do that and to live with the bewilderment.

MacCoun : We try to convey a pair of attitudes that people usually don’t think of together. One is skepticism, as opposed to gullibility, and the importance of cultivating a sense of skepticism. But the other is optimism, as opposed to pessimism. I think Saul was the first person I ever heard say that, you know, most scientists assume that every problem does have a solution, that we will find a solution. We talk about skepticism as the brake pedal and optimism as the gas pedal. If you want to get somewhere, you need both pedals.

BN: I like that, in your book, you talk not only about how to make rational, fact-based decisions individually, but also how to work with other people to come to a consensus when not everyone shares the same values.

Perlmutter : The course could have just stopped with teaching you how to think rationally together. But we decided to incorporate rational thinking with all the other parts that go into a decision, like the values and the goals and the fears and the ambitions. If you don’t come up with some organized, principled way to incorporate all those things together with rationality, we know which parts are going to get lost. It’s not going to be the fears and the goals and the ambitions. It’s going to be the rationality. So if you care about the rationality, then we felt you had to care about what it looks like when you try to weave that together with the values and goals and fears.

Campbell : I think there’s something really awful about the way that we all in Anglo-American society think about values. We think, well, science tells you the objective facts, but science doesn’t tell you anything about values. Therefore, the values are all very subjective. Once we’ve agreed that it’s all very subjective, there’s really no debate possible. All I can do if I think abortion is very wrong, for example, is get a majority on my side and force you to recognize my values. Discussion is impossible. It seems to me that it’s just such an unhelpful way to think about values, given that we do have these opposed values in our society. We actually need the same kind of approach to value that we take to scientific facts.

Perlmutter : You see in history that people have actually moved each other’s understanding about what their values are. Slavery, at one point, would not have been seen the way it is today. And yet, now people have a shared a view of it.

MacCoun : It gets very muddled if you don’t distinguish facts and values. But there are ways of bringing them together in an analysis without just throwing your hands up. A lot of scientists, when they weigh in on public policy, haven’t really thought through some of this stuff, and they’ll just kind of weigh in with what’s basically just a value, but use the mantle of science. In the book, we talk about how it’s not enough to have all these habits of mind that scientists have unless you are in a community that will call you on your B.S.

Perlmutter : One thing that we highlight in the book is the idea that the particularly extreme inability to actually have a conversation that you often see in Congress — at least as presented to the public — is not necessarily the case for the whole society. I think if you take a random group of people in the public, they may disagree on a topic, but if brought into a conversation, they could actually have a conversation about it and try to figure out where the issue is coming from and maybe change their minds about certain topics, which seems to happen when you do these deliberative polls.

MacCoun : Part of the excitement of the book is that there are a lot of new ideas and innovations happening in that space of group decision-making. You have deliberative polling, the idea of don’t just poll people individually, but bring them together and have them talk together. And we talk about scenario planning. We talk about citizen forecasting methods that can outperform professional forecasters. And we talk about new open science models, where you pre-register your hypotheses, and open data. These ideas aren’t static, they’re developing all the time. And that’s part of what where the third millennium idea comes in. We’re getting collectively better at this stuff all the time.

BN: In reading about the process of collective decision-making — techniques such as deliberative polling, scenario planning and collective forecasting — it seems like an exhausting way to reach agreement.

MacCoun : It’s hard work, and I don’t think we’re glib in the book about this being necessarily easy. Conflict isn’t necessarily bad. Conflict can be ferocious and still be very productive, if you do it the right way. If you actually want to do things in the world, you’re going to have to, ultimately, sit down and talk to people that disagree with you.

Campbell : One of the revelations of social psychology is that we’re not bad at spotting biases in each other, but we are terrible at spotting our own biases. It’s just so important to try to create a world where it’s common knowledge that we’re all blind to our own biases, and that it really helps to have someone else around who could pick you up, who could check you on your biases. We have so much in our own heads orienting us in the wrong directions that we really need to clear that up a bit.

BN: But no one likes to be told that they’re wrong.

Perlmutter: That’s actually one of the reasons that we thought that there’s an extra advantage of the probabilistic style of thinking as a way of make sure you capture the information that’s really there without rounding everything off to be true or false. Many things we don’t know, but we do have a pretty good guess that it’s 85% likely to be true. And there’s an extra psychological advantage, which is that if you are committed to presenting all your findings as a probabilistic finding, then you don’t have your ego wrapped up in being right every time.

MacCoun : The problem is that the market rewards experts for overconfidence. I’ve been an expert witness in some of the trials involving gays in the military, and I was really pressed not to hem and haw and just tell me yes or no. I can’t do that.

We’re approaching an election, and we talk in the book about maybe we should start rewarding politicians for being straight with us. Little children find it very reassuring when their parents are all-knowing, but people of voting age are adults, and maybe we should recognize that politicians are not all-knowing. The ones who tell us, “I’m not sure, but this is my best bet,” or go a step further and say, “And if it turns out I’m wrong, I’ll change my mind and here’s my backup plan” — maybe those are the people we should be rewarding.

Campbell : You want to encourage conflict. Conflict is good. That’s the point of free speech. We have different ideas, we try to figure which one is right. Which ones are closer to the truth. But it’s hard to do that without getting inappropriately engaged. Freud had a word for it, cathexis, where your sexual identity becomes involved in maintaining the views that you’ve picked up, and it’s very difficult to let go of the thing. What we need is to have the debate, but have it judged in impersonal terms.

BN: Courses on the scientific method, critical thinking and decision-making are not new. How does your class and book differ from these?

MacCoun : Our book certainly overlaps with two very older traditions: courses or popular books on decision-making, and courses or popular books on critical thinking. Both elements are in our book, but a couple of things are distinctive about our book. It’s inherently interdisciplinary, given the nature of the authors, but we also feel like when people focus on decision-making or critical thinking, they just focus on the individual thinker, and they don’t really capture that that’s not enough. Even people who know about all these biases are still subject to these biases. It’s not enough to just do well as an individual. You really have to cultivate a community to make it stick.

BN: Your book ends on an optimistic note: that we can, in the third millennium, become more collaborative in our problem-solving.

MacCoun : The third millennium is very long. We gave ourselves lots of room to accomplish this.

Campbell : But that is the ideal of society. Everybody knows how to go about deliberating, how to go about discussion, as opposed to thinking they’ve got to win a majority and then bully the other side into submission. That’s really not a good way to go. That leaves you thinking about, “I’ve gotta use guns, because if debate is not possible, then agreement is not possible.”

Perlmutter : One of the things in science that seems to have been very effective is that it really sharpens your thinking when somebody is disagreeing with you. It’s very hard to see your own blind spots if all you have are people who share all your views. You actually should want to find the other party and have a discussion with them. But in this particular configuration that we’re looking at right now, it’s scary — it doesn’t feel like people are comfortable hearing somebody disagree with them and actually thinking, okay, is there something there that I’m missing that I could benefit from.

Take climate change. Climates change all the time, so whether or not we are the ones who started it — though we apparently have started this round — we have to deal with it one way or the other, and now we have to deal with it faster. I think we are perfectly capable of dealing with if we have some conversation and get people to sharpen up their ideas and work together. But it’s very hard to do it when everything is seen as a fight to the death or of not doing something that the other side wants.

BN: What do you hope to achieve with this book?

Perlmutter : In my mind, if people read the book and start to work together in the style that we’re advocating, I would feel much, much safer in the world we live in. I think it would be a noisy, argumentative world, as it should be — people will be trying to figure things out and arguing with each other, but they would be arguing with each other with the goal of actually solving problems together. And they would be, in the end, gaining a much sharper understanding of the reality in which we live. Groups of people, when well-structured, are amazingly capable. All the big concerns you might have about threats of climate change or pandemics or whatever, those are at just the scale that humans are today likely to be good at solving, if given the chance to actually talk together and try to make decisions together.

Campbell : Humans are fundamentally cooperative, though fundamentally tribal. What we need is to have a space where cooperation can happen between people with radically dissimilar views. That’s really the dream.

MacCoun : The U.S. military has learned this. There was tremendous anxiety about allowing gays and lesbians in the circle of military units. The concern was units are just going to fall apart because of differences in lifestyle choices, that the unit will disintegrate. And of course, that’s not at all what happened when they lifted the ban, because people had a shared sense of commitment to the overriding mission. To make a better society, you’ve got to have that shared sense of mission. If you have a shared desire to get somewhere for your community, but radically different ideas on how to get there, you can work it out. There’s lots of examples where people managed to work it out.

The News Literacy Project

Using the news to develop students’ critical thinking

Published on March 10, 2022 Updates

Pamela Brunskill

By Pamela Brunskill

Students today are immersed in a news and information landscape  that pervades every aspect of their lives. From TikTok to Instagram to Twitter, they are inundated with posts, and many of them are not credible or legitimately grounded. It is difficult to know what is true. Because this environment is complex and riddled with misinformation, it provides a prime opportunity to authentically develop students’ critical thinking abilities.

Critical thinking defined

One of the most highly sought goals of educators is to get students to think critically. In a rough sense, this involves the skills and dispositions necessary to make an informed judgment. According to a meta-analysis  on the subject, critical thinking is purposeful, methodical, and habitually inquisitive. Critical thinkers have the skills to interpret, analyze, and evaluate content; they are diligent and persistent in considering a question, and they approach life honestly and with an open mind.

While there is some debate whether the best approach to teaching critical thinking is through generic traits or through discipline-specific skills, a compromised approach allows students to develop both . If we follow the belief that students need context to accurately reason about a subject, then they must have some background knowledge in that subject. How else can they think critically about something? Further, how would that naive thinking compare to that of experts in the field? Regarding the news and information landscape, if students are going to think critically and be discerning with the content they share, then they must learn news literacy.

How to use news literacy to teach critical thinking

Step 1: develop disciplinary literacy in the news.

In an era of misinformation, students can evaluate information by learning how news is made. This includes explicit instruction in  concepts and content  such as identifying different types of information, recognizing the purpose or intent of pieces, understanding the watchdog role of the press, and recognizing quality arguments and evidence. It also includes explicit instruction of  skills  such as evaluating sources, identifying branded content, recognizing bias and motivated reasoning, and verifying evidence. Of course, students also need to demonstrate understanding of these concepts and practice these skills. In so doing, they gain disciplinary literacy, the notion of specialized reading practices for a field of study. Often, disciplinary literacy is framed as thinking like a mathematician, a historian , or a computer programmer . Regardless of the content area, students gain greater depth in their understanding of the underpinnings of that discipline. In this case, students learn to “think like a journalist.”

Example of developing disciplinary literacy: Jennifer Liang Twitter thread

Step 2: Teach topical content

Once students comprehend how news is made, they can deconstruct it and analyze its creation. But they also need the context surrounding the piece of news they’re reading and/or studying. To this end, teachers should provide explicit instruction in the topic at hand, whether it involves immigration, global warming, sports, health, statistics, or any other content area. This is where each discipline offers its own guidance, and as with all good teaching, this requires an effective approach to tackling reading comprehension . This might include studying vocabulary, writing about text through think sheets and short responses, and discussions, among other strategies. Then, students can explain a disciplinary concept such as immigration and explain why not all images of border walls  are accurately portrayed in memes.

Why news literacy?

Of course, integrated studies between all subjects are possible, but there is a special partnership between English and social studies in relation to news literacy. The stakes are high: think about the consequences of misinformation as well as the potential for civic action. A lack of news literacy threatens democracy and our public health — just look at the conspiratorial thinking that led to the Capitol riots and erroneous claims about COVID-19 . Conversely, when individuals have the competency to judge reliable and credible news, they can take civic action such as correcting a piece of misinformation, contacting elected officials, and participating responsibly in political discussions. Being accurately informed is crucial to participating in a democracy.

Example of disciplinary-specific content : Conspiratorial Thinking poster 

Critical thinking is critical in today’s world

Using the news in classrooms can authentically develop higher-level thinking skills and dispositions. Combining understanding of how journalism works along with topical content allows students to determine the credibility of information they encounter. This integration enables students to interpret, analyze, evaluate, explain, and make judgments — to think critically. By teaching news literacy, we can teach students the skills and habits of mind to not only navigate today’s information landscape, but also to navigate our society.

More Updates

NLP’s News Literacy District Fellowship program expands across U.S.

The News Literacy Project has selected nine school districts to join its growing News Literacy District Fellowship program.

Published on Sep 9, 2024 Updates

Track the trends: Stay ahead of these election falsehoods

The News Literacy Project’s Misinformation Dashboard: Election 2024 so far contains more than 600 hundred examples of online falsehoods.

Published on Sep 5, 2024 Updates

Track the trends: Get to know the election dashboard

This blog post, part of a new limited series from the News Literacy Project, provides updates and analysis from the Misinformation Dashboard: Election 2024.

Published on Aug 29, 2024 Updates

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How do you counter misinformation? Critical thinking is step one

Greg Rosalsky

Late last year, in the days before the Slovakian parliamentary elections, two viral audio clips threatened to derail the campaign of a pro-Western, liberal party leader named Michal Šimečka. The first was a clip of Šimečka announcing he wanted to double the price of beer, which, in a nation known for its love of lagers and pilsners, is not exactly a popular policy position.

In a second clip, Šimečka can be heard telling a journalist about his intentions to commit fraud and rig the election. Talk about career suicide, especially for someone known as a champion of liberal democracy.

There was, however, just one issue with these audio clips: They were completely fake.

The International Press Institute has called this episode in Slovakia the first time that AI deepfakes — fake audio clips, images, or videos generated by artificial intelligence — have played a prominent role in a national election. While it's unclear whether these bogus audio clips were decisive in Slovakia's electoral contest, the fact is Šimečka's party lost the election, and a pro-Kremlin populist now leads Slovakia.

In January, a report from the World Economic Forum found that over 1,400 security experts consider misinformation and disinformation (misinformation created with the intention to mislead) the biggest global risk in the next two years — more dangerous than war, extreme weather events, inflation, and everything else that's scary. There are a bevy of new books and a constant stream of articles that wrestle with this issue. Now even economists are working to figure out how to fight misinformation.

In a new study , "Toward an Understanding of the Economics of Misinformation: Evidence from a Demand Side Field Experiment on Critical Thinking," economists John A. List, Lina M. Ramírez, Julia Seither, Jaime Unda and Beatriz Vallejo conduct a real-world experiment to see whether simple, low-cost nudges can be effective in helping consumers to reject misinformation. (Side note: List is a groundbreaking empirical economist at the University of Chicago, and he's a longtime friend of the show and this newsletter ).

While most studies have focused on the supply side of misinformation — social media platforms, nefarious suppliers of lies and hoaxes, and so on — these authors say much less attention has been paid to the demand side: increasing our capacity, as individuals, to identify and think critically about the bogus information that we may encounter in our daily lives.

A Real-Life Experiment To Fight Misinformation

The economists conducted their field experiment in the run-up to the 2022 presidential election in Colombia. Like the United States, Colombia is grappling with political polarization. Within a context of extreme tribalism, the authors suggest, truth becomes more disposable and the demand for misinformation rises. People become willing to believe and share anything in their quest for their political tribe to win.

To figure out effective ways to lower the demand for misinformation, the economists recruited over 2,000 Colombians to participate in an online experiment. These participants were randomly distributed into four different groups.

One group was shown a video demonstrating "how automatic thinking and misperceptions can affect our everyday lives." The video shows an interaction between two people from politically antagonistic social groups who, before interacting, express negative stereotypes about the other's group. The video shows a convincing journey of these two people overcoming their differences. Ultimately, they express regret over unthinkingly using stereotypes to dehumanize one another. The video ends by encouraging viewers to question their own biases by "slowing down" their thinking and thinking more critically.

Another group completed a "a personality test that shows them their cognitive traits and how this makes them prone to behavioral biases." The basic idea is they see their biases in action and become more self-aware and critical of them, thereby decreasing their demand for misinformation.

A third group both watched the video and took the personality test.

Finally, there was a control group, which neither watched the video nor took the personality test.

To gauge whether these nudges get participants to be more critical of misinformation, each group was shown a series of headlines, some completely fake and some real. Some of these headlines leaned left, others leaned right, and some were politically neutral. The participants were then asked to determine whether these headlines were fake. In addition, the participants were shown two untrue tweets, one political and one not. They were asked whether they were truthful and whether they would report either to social media moderators as misinformation.

What They Found

The economists find that the simple intervention of showing a short video of people from politically antagonistic backgrounds getting along inspires viewers to be more skeptical of and less susceptible to misinformation. They find that participants who watch the video are over 30 percent less likely to "consider fake news reliable." At the same time, the video did little to encourage viewers to report fake tweets as misinformation.

Meanwhile, the researchers find that the personality test, which forces participants to confront their own biases, has little or no effect on their propensity to believe or reject fake news. It turns out being called out on our lizard brain tribalism and other biases doesn't necessarily improve our thinking.

In a concerning twist, the economists found that participants who both took the test and watched the video became so skeptical that they were about 31 percent less likely to view true headlines as reliable. In other words, they became so distrustful that even the truth became suspect. As has become increasingly clear, this is a danger in the new world of deepfakes: not only do they make people believe untrue things, they also may make people so disoriented that they don't believe true things.

As for why the videos are successful in helping to fight misinformation, the researchers suggest that it's because they encourage people to stop dehumanizing their political opponents, think more critically, and be less willing to accept bogus narratives even when it bolsters their political beliefs or goals. Often — in a sort of kumbaya way — centrist political leaders encourage us to recognize our commonalities as fellow countrymen and work together across partisan lines. It turns out that may also help us sharpen our thinking skills and improve our ability to recognize and reject misinformation.

Critical Thinking In The Age Of AI

Of course, this study was conducted back in 2022. Back then, misinformation, for the most part, was pretty low-tech. Misinformation may now be getting turbocharged with the rapid proliferation and advancement of artificial intelligence.

List and his colleagues are far from the first scholars to suggest that helping us become more critical thinkers is an effective way to combat misinformation. University of Cambridge psychologist Sander van der Linden has done a lot of work in the realm of what's known as "psychological inoculation," basically getting people to recognize how and why we're susceptible to misinformation as a way to make us less likely to believe it when we encounter it. He's the author of a new book called Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity . Drawing an analogy to how vaccinations work, Van der Linden advocates exposing people to misinformation and showing how it's false as a way to help them spot and to reject misinformation in the wild. He calls it "prebunking" (as in debunking something before it happens).

Of course, especially with the advent of AI deepfakes, misinformation cannot only be combated on the demand side. Social media platforms, AI companies, and the government will all likely have to play an important role. There's clearly a long way to go to overcoming this problem, but we have recently seen some progress. For example, OpenAI recently began "watermarking" AI-generated images that their software produces to help people spot pictures that aren't real. And the federal government recently encouraged four companies to create new technologies to help people distinguish between authentic human speech and AI deepfakes.

This new world where the truth is harder to believe may be pretty scary. But, as this new study suggests, nudges and incentives to get us to slow our thinking, think more critically, and be less tribal could be an important part of the solution.

• misinformation

When critical thinking isn’t enough: to beat information overload, we need to learn ‘critical ignoring’

Director, Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Cognitive scientist, Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Professor of Education and (by courtesy) History, Stanford University

Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol

Disclosure statement

Ralph Hertwig receives funding from the Volkswagen Foundation and the European Commission (HORIZON 2022 grant GA 101094752). He has collaborated with researchers in the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.

Stephan Lewandowsky receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 964728 (JITSUVAX). He also receives funding from Jigsaw (a technology incubator created by Google), from UK Research and Innovation (through the Centre of Excellence, REPHRAIN), and from the Volkswagen Foundation in Germany. He also holds a European Research Council Advanced Grant (no. 101020961, PRODEMINFO) and receives funding from the John Templeton Foundation (via Wake Forest University’s Honesty Project). He has worked with the European Commission on issues relating to social media governance and regulation.

Anastasia Kozyreva and Sam Wineburg do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Bristol provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK.

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The web is an informational paradise and a hellscape at the same time. A boundless wealth of high-quality information is available at our fingertips right next to a ceaseless torrent of low-quality, distracting, false and manipulative information.

The platforms that control search were conceived in sin. Their business model auctions off our most precious and limited cognitive resource: attention. These platforms work overtime to hijack our attention by purveying information that arouses curiosity, outrage, or anger. The more our eyeballs remain glued to the screen, the more ads they can show us, and the greater profits accrue to their shareholders.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, all this should take a toll on our collective attention. A 2019 analysis of Twitter hashtags, Google queries, or Reddit comments found that across the past decade, the rate at which the popularity of items rises and drops has accelerated. In 2013, for example, a hashtag on Twitter was popular on average for 17.5 hours, while in 2016, its popularity faded away after 11.9 hours. More competition leads to shorter collective attention intervals, which lead to ever fiercer competition for our attention – a vicious circle.

To regain control, we need cognitive strategies that help us reclaim at least some autonomy and shield us from the excesses, traps and information disorders of today’s attention economy.

Critical thinking is not enough

The textbook cognitive strategy is critical thinking , an intellectually disciplined, self-guided and effortful process to help identify valid information. In school, students are taught to closely and carefully read and evaluate information. Thus equipped, they can evaluate the claims and arguments they see, hear, or read. No objection. The ability to think critically is immensely important.

But is it enough in a world of information overabundance and gushing sources of disinformation? The answer is “No” for at least two reasons.

First, the digital world contains more information than the world’s libraries combined. Much of it comes from unvetted sources and lacks reliable indicators of trustworthiness. Critically thinking through all information and sources we come across would utterly paralyse us because we would never have time to actually read the valuable information we painstakingly identify.

Second, investing critical thinking in sources that should have been ignored in the first place means that attention merchants and malicious actors have been gifted what they wanted, our attention.

Critical ignoring to make information management feasible

So, what tools do we have at our disposal beyond critical thinking? In our recent article , we – a philosopher, two cognitive scientists and an education scientist – argue that as much as we need critical thinking we also need critical ignoring .

Critical ignoring is the ability to choose what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. Critical ignoring is more than just not paying attention – it’s about practising mindful and healthy habits in the face of information overabundance.

We understand it as a core competence for all citizens in the digital word.

Without it, we will drown in a sea of information that is, at best, distracting and, at worst, misleading and harmful.

Tools for critical ignoring

Three main strategies exist for critical ignoring. Each one responds to a different type of noxious information.

In the digital world, self-nudging aims to empower people to be citizen “choice architects” by designing their informational environments in ways that work best for them and that constrain their activities in beneficial ways. We can, for instance, remove distracting and irresistible notifications. We may set specific times in which messages can be received, thereby creating pockets of time for concentrated work or socialising. Self-nudging can also help us take control of our digital default settings, for instance, by restricting the use of our personal data for purposes of targeted advertisement.

Lateral reading is a strategy that enables people to emulate how professional fact checkers establish the credibility of online information . It involves opening up new browser tabs to search for information about the organisation or individual behind a site before diving into its contents. Only after consulting the open web do skilled searchers gauge whether expending attention is worth it. Before critical thinking can begin, the first step is to ignore the lure of the site and check out what others say about its alleged factual reports. Lateral reading thus uses the power of the web to check the web.

Most students fail at that task. Past studies show that, when deciding whether a source should be trusted, students (as well as university professors ) do what years of school has taught them to do – they read closely and carefully. Attention merchants as well as merchants of doubt are jubilant.

Online, looks can be deceiving. Unless one has extensive background knowledge it is often very difficult to figure out that a site, filled with the trappings of serious research, peddles falsehoods about climate change or vaccinations or any variety of historical topics, such as the Holocaust. Instead of getting entangled in the site’s reports and professional design, fact checkers exercise critical ignoring. They evaluate the site by leaving it and engage in lateral reading instead.

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The do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic targets online trolls and other malicious users who harass, cyberbully or use other antisocial tactics. Trolls thrive on attention, and deliberate spreaders of dangerous disinformation often resort to trolling tactics. One of the main strategies that science denialists use is to hijack people’s attention by creating the appearance of a debate where none exists . The heuristic advises against directly responding to trolling. Resist debating or retaliating. Of course, this strategy of critical ignoring is only a first line of defence. It should be complemented by blocking and reporting trolls and by transparent platform content moderation policies including debunking.

These three strategies are not a set of elite skills. Everybody can make use of them, but educational efforts are crucial for bringing these tools to the public.

Critical ignoring as a new paradigm for education

The philosopher Michael Lynch has noted that the Internet “is both the world’s best fact-checker and the world’s best bias confirmer – often at the same time.”

Navigating it successfully requires new competencies that should be taught in school. Without the competence to choose what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attention, we allow others to seize control of our eyes and minds. Appreciation for the importance of critically ignoring is not new but has become even more crucial in the digital world.

As the philosopher and psychologist William James astutely observed at the beginning of the 20th century: “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to ignore.”

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Critical thinking skills not emphasized by most middle school teachers.

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Students raise their hands to answer a teacher's question at the KIPP Academy in the South Bronx, ... [+] part of a network of public middle schools that is becoming a model for educating poor children. KIPP — which stands for Knowledge is Power Program — institutions are rigorous college preparatory schools where both students and their parents must sign a contract pledging long hours, extra homework, summer school, and excellent attendance records. Using strict discipline with highly motivated — and paid — teachers, the KIPP program has proven that public education can work. In the Bronx, the school has a famous music program, where children practice the songs of Lauryn Hill and Alicia Keys. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

Recent events show that there has never been a more crucial time for critical thinking. A global onslaught of misinformation, social media saturation, partisan politics, and science skepticism continuously challenge how information is shared, understood, and how it influences the decisions people make.

Research from the Reboot Foundation and others show that an overwhelming majority of the population recognizes the importance of critical thinking skills in today’s modern society. From parents to employers, there is near unanimous support for the teaching of critical skills in American classrooms, yet new national survey data shows schools may not be teaching those skills often enough.

A new Reboot paper, Teaching Critical Thinking in K-12: When There’s A Will But Not Always A Way , examines the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and found that the teaching of critical thinking skills is inconsistent across states and tends to drop as students get older.

Among some of the key findings from NAEP:

• While 86 percent of 4th grade teachers said they put “quite a bit” or “a lot of emphasis” on deductive reasoning, that figure fell to only 39 percent of teachers in 8th grade. Deductive reasoning is one of the key skills in critical thinking, as it requires students to take a logical approach to turning general ideas into specific conclusions.
• At the state level, the analysis found that only seven states had at least 50 percent of their 8th grade teachers report that they place “quite a bit or a lot of emphasis” on teaching their students to engage in deductive reasoning.

While the numbers themselves are cause for concern, the age range at which these statistics are being reported is equally concerning. Research shows that while critical thinking skills can be learned at any stage of life, the teen years are an opportune time to engage young people as their brains are developing strong cognitive abilities.

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These years are exactly when students should be building a strong foundation of critical thinking competencies that can last a lifetime. Developmental psychologists have noted that beginning at around age 13, adolescents can begin to acquire and apply formal logical rules and processes, if they are shown how. Yet the data shows that schools are largely failing to capitalize on this period, despite a desire by many educators to do so.

Per NAEP, nearly 90% of 4th grade teachers nationally said they put “quite a bit” or “a lot of emphasis” on deductive reasoning, only for that figure to fall to less than 40% of teachers in 8th grade – what issues are contributing to the drastic drop?

In 2020, Reboot surveyed teachers and found that many teachers harbored misconceptions about how to best teach critical thinking. The survey found that, among teachers, 42 percent reported that students should learn basic facts first, then engage in critical thinking practice, while an additional 16 percent said that they believed basic facts and critical thinking should be taught separately. This line of thinking is wrong, as research strongly suggests that critical thinking skills are best acquired in combination with the teaching of basic facts in a subject area.

This commonly-held misconception about when and how to teach critical thinking skills might be a clue as to why deductive reasoning instruction seems to tail off as students get older and take more specialized, content-driven classes. This might be made worse by the fact that eighth grade is a crucial year for many schools to show success under their state accountability measures.

In many states, students cannot move on to high school if they fail state exams in eighth grade. And things such as teacher pay, school funding and other “high-stakes” accountability measures often hinge on student performance in that grade. This pressure forces schools and teachers to focus on preparing their eighth graders for state exams in lieu of a more well-rounded educational experience. Indeed, our 2020 survey of teachers revealed that 55 percent believed that the emphasis on standardized testing made it more difficult to incorporate critical thinking instruction in their classrooms.

Reboot and others are working to identify ways teachers can implement critical thinking skills education into their curriculums more simply and efficiently. Among the stepping stones toward broader adoption are:

• A shared standard or consensus around critical thinking education that could contribute to more uniform and equitable teaching of these key skills nationwide.
• An easier way to broach critical thinking for a wide-ranging group of students. New research by Reboot and researchers from Indiana University explores innovative, inexpensive and scalable ways to teach critical thinking skills. The research found that educators and others can teach and hone essential critical thinking skills using a simple method that is easy to implement across diverse groups of students.

So even as the recent data from NAEP is disappointing on skills like deductive reasoning, it also shows where improvement needs to occur. What remains to be seen is the nation’s commitment to advancing critical thinking skills and its support for the educators, administrators and stakeholders working to knock down the challenges being faced. As NAEP and other surveys show, there is indeed a will to move forward with critical thinking skills education among teachers. Dedicated resources and consistent collaboration will be crucial to finding “the way.”

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3 Simple Habits to Improve Your Critical Thinking

by Helen Lee Bouygues

Summary .   

Too many business leaders are simply not reasoning through pressing issues, and it’s hurting their organizations.  The good news is that critical thinking is a learned behavior. There are three simple things you can do to train yourself to become a more effective critical thinker: question assumptions, reason through logic, and diversify your thought and perspectives. They may sound obvious, but deliberately cultivating these three key habits of mind go a long way in helping you become better at clear and robust reasoning.

A few years ago, a CEO assured me that his company was the market leader. “Clients will not leave for competitors,” he added. “It costs too much for them to switch.” Within weeks, the manufacturing giant Procter & Gamble elected not to renew its contract with the firm. The CEO was shocked — but he shouldn’t have been.

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Predicting everyday critical thinking: a review of critical thinking assessments.

1. Introduction

2. how critical thinking impacts everyday life, 3. critical thinking: skills and dispositions.

“the use of those cognitive skills and abilities that increase the probability of a desirable outcome. It is used to describe thinking that is purposeful, reasoned, and goal directed—the kind of thinking involved in solving problems, formulating inferences, calculating likelihoods, and making decisions” ( Halpern 2014, p. 8 ).

4. Measuring Critical Thinking

4.1. practical challenges, 4.2. critical thinking assessments, 4.2.1. california critical thinking dispositions inventory (cctdi; insight assessment, inc. n.d. ), 4.2.2. california critical thinking skills test (cctst; insight assessment, inc. n.d. ), 4.2.3. cornell critical thinking test (cctt; the critical thinking company n.d. ), 4.2.4. california measure of mental motivation (cm3; insight assessment, inc. n.d. ), 4.2.5. ennis–weir critical thinking essay test ( ennis and weir 2005 ), 4.2.6. halpern critical thinking assessment (hcta; halpern 2012 ), 4.2.7. test of everyday reasoning (ter; insight assessment, inc. n.d. ), 4.2.8. watson–glaser tm ii critical thinking appraisal (w-gii; ncs pearson, inc. 2009 ).

“Virtual employees, or employees who work from home via a computer, are an increasing trend. In the US, the number of virtual employees has increased by 39% in the last two years and 74% in the last five years. Employing virtual workers reduces costs and makes it possible to use talented workers no matter where they are located globally. Yet, running a workplace with virtual employees might entail miscommunication and less camaraderie and can be more time-consuming than face-to-face interaction”.

5. Conclusions

Institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Butler, H.A. Predicting Everyday Critical Thinking: A Review of Critical Thinking Assessments. J. Intell. 2024 , 12 , 16. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence12020016

Butler HA. Predicting Everyday Critical Thinking: A Review of Critical Thinking Assessments. Journal of Intelligence . 2024; 12(2):16. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence12020016

Butler, Heather A. 2024. "Predicting Everyday Critical Thinking: A Review of Critical Thinking Assessments" Journal of Intelligence 12, no. 2: 16. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence12020016

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• Published: 03 February 2021

Exploring linguistic features, ideologies, and critical thinking in Chinese news comments

• Yang Gao   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5888-6033 1 &
• Gang Zeng 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  8 , Article number:  39 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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• Cultural and media studies
• Language and linguistics

This study explores linguistic features, ideological beliefs, and critical thinking in news comments, which are defined as the comments from readers to news posts on social media or platforms. Within the overarching framework of critical discourse analysis, a sociocognitive approach was adopted to provide detailed analyses of the studied constructs in sampled news comments. In terms of the data collection and analysis, sampled social media, news columns, and news comments were selected, and then 19 college students were interviewed for their responses to different news topics. The primary findings of the study include: (1) personal and social opinions are representations of ideological beliefs and are fully presented through news comments, (2) these personal and social ideological beliefs may diverge or converge due to critical thinking, (3) critical thinking helps commenters form their personal and social ideologies, and then helps them choose the linguistic forms they believe fit their news comments, (4) news topics, however, vary in informing commenters’ critical thinking ability. Finally, a sociocognitive model for studying linguistic forms, ideologies, and critical thinking was proposed in the study.

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Introduction.

Over the decades, the majority of the existing literature on news text has focused on how the news is framed from an author’s perspective; however, research on news text from commenters is far less developed. Therefore, we chose a specific type of underdeveloped news text, i.e., news comment, as the focal text for this study. In the study, news comments were not defined as the long commentary articles professionals or journalists write to comment on specific news; instead they were the real-time, short comments or prompts from readers. We took the theoretical premise from van Dijk ( 1997 ) that news text is ideological in nature (p. 197) and explored how critical thinking and linguistic forms, as different constructs, may inform the commenters of revealed ideologies through a specific news text. Before we elaborate on the theoretical framework, we present some synopses of the terms or constructs, i.e., ideology and critical thinking, the focal components of the study.

Van Dijk ( 2006 ) defined ideologies as “systems of ideas” and sociocognitively “shared representations of social groups, and more specifically as the axiomatic principles of such representations” (p. 115). Ideologies are thus “the basic frameworks for organizing the social cognitions shared by members of social groups, organizations or institutions” (van Dijk, 1997 , p. 18) and penetrate all discourse and communication, including media text as one of the predominant forms. From a critical literacy perspective, Tolson ( 2001 ) argued that the informational content conveyed through the mass media is ideology-based; it reproduces and strengthens social relations between the oppressed and the oppressors. Therefore, news commentary, as one type of media text, shows the audience’s attitudes towards a particular news, topic, or event; it conveys the ideological beliefs that audiences hold about the news, topics, or events. Fairclough ( 2006 ) argued that understanding how audiences interpret and respond to the news is helpful to analyze their ideologies. However, the explicitness or vagueness of the ideological beliefs revealed through media discourse or news text makes research on this topic difficult.

Ideologies include cognitive and social ideologies and these two types of ideologies may converge or diverge. We argue that the convergence or divergence of these two types of ideologies depends on critical thinking, another construct that we explore in the study. The notion of critical thinking may be traced to different fragmented tenets of critical discourse analysis (CDA). At the same time, it is one of the core components in interpreting discourse and text (Fairclough, 2006 ). Critical thinking is related to the notion of reflexivity in some classic CDA works; it may refer to both a general principle of doing scientific research and a property of language use, subjectivity, or practice (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999 ; Feustel et al., 2014 ; Zienkowski, 2017 ). For example, Fairclough ( 2010 ) stated that

“Late modernity is characterized by increasing reflexivity including language reflexivity, and people need to be equipped both for the increasing knowledge-based design of discursive practices within economic and governmental systems, and for critique and redesign of these designed and often globalized practices” (p. 603).

Multiple approaches have been used to study linguistic features, ideologies, and critical thinking. Studying these constructs is a challenging task. Because the complex world is dynamic and changes regularly, a specific and individual framework may not be able to interpret or explain the constructs thoroughly. Furthermore, some the focal components or tenets of some theories or frameworks may overlap, which complicates the selection of a theoretical framework. For the current study, we decided to pinpoint our focal constructs and then align these constructs with appropriate theories. While CDA has been applied to studies on language and ideology for decades, it has rarely been considered with regard to news comments, particularly in the Chinese context. This research thus aims to study the linguistic features of news comments through major social media in China and to further explore ideological and critical thinking incidents in these commentary responses. Specifically, we attempt to explore the following issues: (1) the typical linguistic forms, ideologies, and critical thinking in news comments and (2) how these constructs inform each other in news comments.

Theoretical considerations

Under the overarching concept of CDA, different focal approaches or schools have developed over the years, including but not limited to: Fairclough’s Critical Approach, Wodak’s Discourse-historical Approach, and van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach (SCA). Fairclough’s approach has been regarded as the foundational and most classic approach. It perceives language as a social process in which discourse produces and interprets text; however, this process is not random or free but is socially conditioned. Fairclough’s approach has infrequently focused on media text, which then has been extended and developed by Wodak and van Dijk. Unlike Fairclough’s approach, Wodak’s approach focuses on a macroperspective as national identity and is concerned with strategies that can be adapted to achieve specific political and psychological goals. To understand this bigger picture, Wodak’s approach includes historical analysis and considers the sociocultural background of the text studied. In terms of media text study, Wodak and Busch ( 2004 ) analyzed different approaches in media text, from mapping out historical development in CDA to advanced qualitative approaches in critical linguistics and CDA.

SCA resembles Fairclough’s approach in connecting the microstructure of language to the macrostructure of society (Kintsch and van Dijk, 1978 ). However, van Dijk ( 1993 ) extended the field by transplanting social cognition as the mediating tool between text and society. He defined social cognitions as “socially shared representations of societal arrangements, groups, and relations, as well as mental operations such as interpretation, thinking and arguing, inferencing and learning” (p. 257). Similar to Wodak, van Dijk ( 1991 ) applied his approach of discourse analysis to media texts and firmly believed that one area in which discourse can play an important role is in the (re)production of racism inequality through discourse. The major point of his work is that “racism is a complex system of social and political inequality that is also reproduced by discourse” (van Dijk, 2001 , p. 362). Van Dijk’s SCA thus focuses on the schemata through which minorities are perceived and illustrated as well as in headlines in the press.

We firmly believe that no single approach mentioned above perfectly fits all the constructs to be studied in the research, but tenets of different approaches work in different ways to inform the findings of the study. We went deeper into these frameworks and determined that an SCA approach under CDA may better inform the study and thus serve as the theoretical foundation of the study; it works better than other approaches in mapping out relationships among language, cognition in which critical thinking is embedded, and ideologies. However, we did not adhere to a specific school or approach in CDA but instead incorporated different tenets among three different schools in CDA into our study. For example, we referred to a textual analysis perspective from the three-dimensional framework (Fairclough, 1995 ) and extended and interpreted our findings by incorporating social and national ideologies from Wodak ( 2007 ) and social/personal cognition from van Dijk ( 1997 ).

In addition, we reinterpreted CDA from an audience or commenter perspective rather than the author perspective. Our rationale is that the text an author or speaker has framed may serve discursive and social purposes. The author or speaker in this way serves as the initiator of the discursive and social practices. However, this is not the case from an audience or reader perspective. An audience or reader is not the initiator of the actions or practices; he or she may be the person who accepts or rejects the practices. Therefore, we argue that examining ideological and critical thinking constructs in news comments may reveal audiences’ perceptions of and attitudes towards certain practices and even the power behind these practices.

Research methodology

Wodak and Meyer ( 2015 ) concluded that “CDA does not constitute a well-defined empirical method but rather a bulk of approaches with theoretical similarities and research questions of a specific kind” (p. 27). They further explained that methodologies under CDA typically fall into a hermeneutic rather than an analytical-deductive approach. The hermeneutic style requires detailed analyses and reasoning that fit the theoretical framework in the study.

While it might be a challenging task to pinpoint a specific methodology, we followed appropriate guidance in conducting this CDA study. As classic methodological guidance, Wodak and Meyer ( 2015 ) provided a diagrammed process for conducting CDA studies, including theory , operationalization , discourse/text , and interpretation . Theories provide the soil for the conceptualization and selection of theoretical frameworks; operationalization demands specific procedures and instruments; discourse/text is a platform to convey the information; and interpretation is the stage to examine assumptions. One of the major components that guide the methodological design and selection is operationalization, which requires specific procedures and instruments. Therefore, we first selected social media and sampled news and then conducted interviews among 19 college students in a typical research-based university in Northeast China.

Selection of the social media and news columns

Liu ( 2019 ) synthesized social media user reports in the first quarter of 2018 and listed the top 10 social media software and apps that people used in China, which included payment apps (e.g., Alipay), shopping platforms and/or apps (e.g., Taobao), and other platforms and/or apps for entertainment or regular social purposes (e.g., WeChat, Baidu, Sina). According to the poll, we selected WeChat (1040 million users), Baidu search (700 million users), and Sina vlog (392 million users) as the three social media we used for the current study.

Among the three largest social media platforms, Baidu News has a specific classification of 12 news columns, which include domestic affairs, international affairs, military and army, finance and economics, entertainment, sports, internet, technology, gaming, and beauty. The column military and army was an outlier in the selection because it is heavily political or ideological in the context; gaming and beauty were also regarded as two outliers that were highly gender-oriented. After a screening process, we thus deleted and synthesized these columns into six, including domestic/international affairs, finance, entertainment, sports, technology, and game.

Then, one or two news samples were selected under each topic, considering whether the samples might solicit rich information from the interviewees or commenters. For analysis purposes, we collected representative responses with high recognition of the selected news samples. We then conducted a rough analysis of the selected news and corresponding comments and discussed the appropriateness of the news samples. We finalized 12 sampled news items with more than 30 comments and charted them in Table 1 .

Participants

Participants in the study included both public users of social media and undergraduates from an eastern university in China. First, representative news reviews in six categories, including finance, sports, international, domestic, entertainment, and technology, were collected. The comment publishers were social media users from Baidu, Sina Weibo, Surging News, etc.

Additionally, we conducted individual interviews with 19 undergraduates from a university in Northeast China. The interviews focused on the research participants’ opinions on the news. Among the participants, there were three freshmen, 14 sophomores, and two juniors. The ratio of males to females was 9/10. The research participants were from eight different schools: the Law School, the School of Foreign Languages, the School of Sciences, the School of Maritime Electrical Engineering, the School of Transportation Engineering, the Navigation School, the School of Information Science and Technology, and the School of Public Management and Liberal Arts (see Table 2 ).

We conducted one-on-one interviews with 19 undergraduates from a research-based university in Northeast China. The participants of the research were from diverse backgrounds, and the interviews mainly focused on the participants’ views on the news. To ensure the reliability of the results, the participants were not informed until the interview began on site. We conducted the interviews in a casual, conversational format. Each interview lasted ~20 min and aimed to solicit the students’ prompt, real-time responses to the column news. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed for data collection and analysis purposes.

An interview protocol was designed based on the sampled news analysis. The interview protocol consisted of news subjects and guiding sentences. The news subjects were the originally quoted news, while the guiding sentences were directed to each individual news sample. The protocol questionnaire was used to guide the participants to go through the news and then make an instant response.

Data collection and analysis

With the designed interview protocol, corresponding interviews were conducted with 19 college students in the form of casual conversations. Through the WeChat platform and other media, university students’ personal thoughts about specific news were recorded because most of the interviewees had chosen to use text and audio records in WeChat to express themselves. The researchers collected and organized the obtained information and added it to the information charts after acquiring the permission of the interviewees, who were selected from different year levels and faculties. Preliminarily, there were a total of 25 participants who attended the interview and provided nearly 50 pieces of interview information. The researchers finalized the participant size to 19 by deleting some outlier responses. Finally, data collected from the two primary methods were integrated by the researchers and then categorized into four sections, including news content, typical responses, interview responses, and analyses.

Detailed analyses from SCA worked to guide the specific methodology used for the current study due to its theoretical foundation and constructs, including linguistic forms, ideology, and critical thinking, which we wanted to explore. Specifically, SCA suggests six steps of analyses, including semantic macrostructures (topics and macro propositions), local meanings, “subtle” formal structures, global and local discourse forms or formats, linguistic realizations, and the context (Wodak and Meyer, 2015 ). Some types of analyses focus on linguistic forms and figures of speech analysis, some of the analyses focus on literal or connotative meanings, and others on context. It is worth mentioning that not all the analyses can be completely conducted in one single study because some analyses do not fit a specific study. However, these analyses offered methodological insights for the current study. We took steps in collecting different sources of data and analyzed the data in different ways.

Linguistics: lexical, syntactic, and figurative speech features

Van Dijk ( 1995 ) argued that the first step for analysts in CDA studies is to “explore the structures and strategies of text and talk to attend in order to discover patterns of elite dominance or manipulation ‘in’ texts” (p. 19). As van Dijk ( 2006 ) stated, “Although general properties of language and discourse are not, as such, ideologically marked, systematic discourse analysis offers powerful methods to study the structures and functions of underlying ideologies” (p. 115). Therefore, linguistic forms are excellent representations and tools to study ideologies in text. Linguistic features of the text, as a formal property of the text (Fairclough, 1989 , p. 26), are explored in the descriptive stage. One of the features is that idioms, as a way to show respondents’ attitudes and ideologies through the linguistic form, are widely used in the news comments. Idioms are generally used among people with certain cultural capitals. They are socially conditioned, and outgroup people may find them difficult to comprehend. By using idioms, news respondents present shared sociocultural knowledge that can only be easily processed among ingroup people. In the study, many idioms were found in the news comments, such as “ hai ren zhi xin bu ke you, fang ren zhi xin bu ke wu (guard against all intents to harm you, but harbor no intention to harm others)”, “ yan zhen yi dai (be on guard)”, “ jing dai hua kai (wait for the blossom)”, “ zuo wu xu xi (be fully seated)”, and “ qi er yi ju (an effortless job to do)”. The idiomatic expression resonates with what SCA argues are local meanings (Wodak and Meyer, 2015 ) because it focuses on the meanings in the specific, local context.

In addition, connotative meanings of the lexical terms that were connected with figure-of-speech usage appeared in the news commentary, such as, “It might not be good to comment on people’s backyard if one had never lived in Hong Kong.” The backyard in the sentence has a connotative meaning and is used as a metonymy. The feature relates to dialectical and regional terms; some of these cultural capitals behind these terms are deeply rooted in particular regions. Again, the lexical choice, e.g., the backyard, indicates an ingroup–outgroup dichotomy and thus embodies certain personal or social ideologies. A typical SCA approach suggests that language realization analysis requires a figure of speech analysis, which helps map out the local and global meanings of a specific excerpt (van Dijk, 1995 ; Wodak and Meyer, 2015 ).

In terms of the syntactic structure, the research showed that social media platforms and interviewees mainly used relatively complex, notably parallel sentence structures. Examples are the use of the metaphor in “Martial art is not equal to Kungfu. Art involves manifestation and form, while Kungfu involves speed and flexibility. Basketball is a kind of Kungfu, not martial arts. Chinese athletes lack Kungfu but have little success in martial arts” (News, Responsible for the Failure of the Chinese Men’s Basketball Team? A Dejiang, He is a Man, Zhou Qi Needs Care ) or “Like art, the sport has no borders” (News, After Chinese Netizens, Boycotted the NBA, the NBA China Game is Still Fully Seated, and Some People Even Let the Player Sign on the Chinese Flag ). The use of rhetorical techniques, such as metaphors, also increased the complexity of the syntactic structure.

The parallel structure served two primary purposes: it restated the points that the news respondents or the college students attempted to emphasize, and it fostered either a provoking or an emotional context that resonated with the news commentary readers. For example, “Since the start of the match, the Chinese women’s volleyball team has defeated South Korea, vanquished Cameroon, edged out Russia, knocked out Japan, and beaten Brazil” (News: The Chinese Women’s Volleyball Team beat Brazil, Warming up before the Sino-U.S. Confrontation ). Another example with repeated terms and concepts was “Ball, the ball, is just a ball; the country is always behind you” (News: After Chinese Netizens Boycotted the NBA, the NBA China Game is Still Fully Seated, and Some People Even Let the Player Sign on the Chinese Flag ). In the responses in the first example, repetitive verb forms fostered an accelerating sense of excitement for Chinese readers, who may feel proud to be a member of that winning country. In the other example, the repeated term ball puts readers at the front of national and personal interests and may cause a provoking sense of quitting the game for the sake of national interests.

Ideological and critical thinking accounts

Van Dijk ( 1995 ) argued,

“[T]he social functions of ideologies are, among others, to allow members of a group to organize (admission to) their group, coordinate their social actions and goals, to protect their (privileged) resources, or, conversely, to gain access to such resources in the case of dissident or oppositional groups” (p. 19).

We argue that linguistic features as mentioned above did not directly form or express the ideologies of news commenters or interviewees; instead, they indirectly indicated or expressed the ideologies of these commenters and interviewees. This may result from the nature of news commentary, which is a way to represent commenters’ views or opinions and presents certain personal or social ideologies. Through the textual analysis, we found that the way the news is framed may arouse commenters’ acceptance or rejection of the content of news text, which indicates their sense of group relations and structures (van Dijk, 1995 ). For example, a strong sense of ingroup affiliation was revealed through most of the news commentary and interviewee responses. News commenters and interviewees had a strong sense of pride and praise for news related to the economic or political power of China. Exemplar sentences of pride and praise for China’s strength included, “The increase in the creativity of Chinese companies in recent years shows the great potential of China’s high-tech industry,” “Support domestic products!” and “The Chinese Women’s Volleyball Team won the 13th Women’s Volleyball World Cup with a record of 11 wins….” Van Dijk ( 1995 ) argued, “The contents and schematic organization of group ideologies in the social mind shared by its members are a function of the properties of the group within the societal structure” (p. 19). This is true even when social cognition may conflict with personal cognition. In this study, most interviewees had a strong sense of honor in their home country even when facing conflicts between personal interests and national interests.

While ideologies define and explain the similarities in the social practices of social members, they also leave room for individual variation and differences, which contributes to a “dynamic and dialectic” relationship between social ideology and personal cognition (van Dijk, 1995 , p. 19). Personal cognition or ideology thus becomes an embodiment of critical thinking (van Dijk, 2006 ). Van Dijk ( 2006 ) explained that the analysis of ideologies is actually a critical analysis because ideologies may be used as a foundation to study critical thinking. Studying whether certain ideologies and personal cognition diverge or converge may indicate how critical thinking works. In our study, we found the emergence of critical thinking in the form of multiple, diverse perspectives in news reviews, comments, or responses. For example, the news responders were able to interpret news based on the pros and cons or multiple perspectives; we connect that multiperspective analysis with their critical thinking ability. The analysis of critical thinking is above the ideological analysis in the news commentary; it helped the researchers evaluate whether the respondents’ or commenters’ patriotism was rational. For example, in the commentary “we should not pursue foreign products too much, but the advanced technology contained in the foreign products is something we can learn from,” instead of being blindly patriotic, the respondent may show a sense of rationalism in his/her response: stopping the purchase of foreign products is hardly equal to stopping the learning of advanced technology in designing or manufacturing these products. Another example is “Sports, like art, has no national boundaries, but one should stand firmly on the side of the nation as a Chinese when national political issues are involved in sports.”

Topics and news comments

We also found that news topics may inform linguistic features, ideological beliefs, and critical thinking accounts in the news comments in different ways. Wodak and Meyer ( 2015 ) explained that topics are an important semantic macrostructure to be addressed in SDA analyses.

Topics and languages

Generally, news topics varied in their power to generate lexical and syntactical structures. Some topics on politics, the economy, and technology led the commenters to be more rigorous in their wording and phrasing, and their commentary language was more professional and formal than it was for other topics from entertainment and sports. The following example is one response to the news on China’s development of 5G technology: “First, it shows the progress China has made in science and technology in recent years, and the relevant policies are effective… second, ….” The responder provided more details and even listed points for the reasoning. The commentary was not simply in a narrative or colloquial format but instead was organized in a logical way. The same type of commentary was revealed through the news on “The Giant Carrefour Lost to China….” Sample responses included the following: “With the development of the commodity retail industry, there is a need for consumers’ needs to be met in the first place. The consumer values quality, cost efficiency, and then brands. To keep consumers within long-term development, service is another vital part. Next….” The sampled interview response also indicated the interviewed responder’s analysis of the rationale for why Carrefour had lost its market shares in China.

On the other hand, we found that comments on entertainment topics were presented in a more informal way than other issues. For example, when some responders were interviewed about their responses to news related to stars or celebrities’ clothing or behavior, they directly expressed their belief that it was not their business or was a personal issue for the stars or celebrities. The closer the topic was to life, the simpler the language was in terms of wording and expressions.

Topics, ideologies, and critical thinking

In terms of how topics related to or informed ideological beliefs in news commentary, we found that the research samples presented significant patriotic tendencies in news comments on science and technology, sports, and international and domestic affairs. These topics included national infrastructure and economic development, national interests, and sports competitions with other countries, which might easily inspire the national self-esteem and national self-confidence of newsreaders and respondents. The responses to these news topics in the sample reflected strong support for the home country. Most of these responses were affirmative and positive, showing the commenters’ chauvinistic attitudes towards specific nationalist characteristics or stating factual evidence of China’s progress in a positive way. For example, responses to the news “China has the world’s first 5G standard necessary patents” were mostly positive and affirming, with the majority applauding and supporting the development of the technology in China. A few comments presented a critical, dialectical analysis on its advantages and disadvantages. A critical, dialectical analysis serves as a principal way to motivate and probe a thinker, with its goal to push the thinker go beyond the ideas and values, their significance, and their limitations. Dialectical thinking is a way of thinking that replaces or serves as a counterpart of logical thinking. Originally derived from the tenets of German philosopher Hegel (e.g., 1971 , 1975 ), dialectical thinking promotes tenets including being self-critical and taking nothing for granted. Dialectical thinking focuses on how reflectivity helps a thinker extend the dimensions of his/her repertoire of a certain concept or thing. Among ways of dialectical thinking is the Marxist dialectic which applies to the study of historical materialism and deeply influences Asian culture.

Marxist materialism is melded to the Hegelian dialectic (e.g., Marx, 1975 ). Marx opposes metaphysics, which he considered unscientific but instead asserted that reality was directly perceived by the observer without an intervening conceptual apparatus. He then used the dialectic, a metaphysical system which he thought to be empirically true. The Marxist dialectic considers theory and practice to be a single entity and that what men actually do demonstrates the truth. In the same vein, Dewey’s logic including learning by doing is also influenced by Hegel’s dialectical thinking, which highlights the experimental situation rather than from an externally validated formal system (Rytina and Loomis, 1970 ).

In the current study, we argued that Marxist dialectical analysis or thinking helps commenters or readers think about and interpret news from a multidimensional, unstable, and empirical way. We did find in a critical, dialectical way of thinking in a few news comments. Specifically, regarding the way topics related to or informed critical thinking in news commentary, we found that responses to news topics on entertainment and domestic topics diverged, which indicated different voices or perspectives on the news. Respondents tended to provide more critical thinking accounts on the news. The awareness of critical thinking is mainly reflected in the fact that the commenter can analyze the event from multiple aspects rather than interpreting the problem in isolation or can be aware that his or her point of view starts from only one perspective. For example, responses to the news on Wang Yuan smoking in public places and Rayza’s airport look diverged in the different opinions of the respondents. Some believed stars or celebrities should have their own privacy and identity, whereas others believed they should set good examples for the public and avoid traditionally defined misbehaviors. Another example was found in the news comments that stated that how much a person earns could lead to financial independence or help people be self-sufficient. The following is a sampled response:

“Simply talking about financial freedom is not rational, as it is hard to define what is it. Financial freedom may come from one’s inner satisfaction. For example, successful businessmen have tons of money, but there are also many things for them to consider, including social responsibility and company operation. Money, for them, cannot be spent at will….”

We detected rational analysis from the responder, who was able to analyze the news from multiple perspectives in a logical and rational way. Examples in the responder’s commentary made sense, suggesting that one’s self-sufficiency cannot be measured simply by how much he/she earns or possesses.

Linguistic features, discursive practice, and social practice

Drawing upon systemic functional grammar (Halliday, 1978 ), Fairclough acknowledged that language is, to some extent, a social practice. The reason why the form of language is mainly determined by its social function is revealed in the perspective of the social communication function of discourse. Discourse is not only seen as a form of language but is also embodied as a social practice. CDA essentially studies society from a linguistic perspective and links linguistic analysis with social commentary.

News comments in the study indicate the respondents’ attitudes, which may render any discursive practice in the form of speech acts (Fairclough, 1989 , 1995 ). For example, some commenters held subjective views against smoking in public places, dissatisfaction with cyber violence specific to women’s clothing, and positive support and encouragement of the Chinese Women’s Volleyball Team and the Chinese Men’s Basketball Team. The social participation of the respondents was revealed through the text, which represents discursive and social practice. The commenters whose comments reflected multifaceted and multilayered thinking or ideology had a high degree of social participation, and those whose comments had explicit attitudes towards real life had a high degree of social participation. In addition to ideology, the responses served a social function (van Dijk, 1995 ). For instance, “smoking in public is not appropriate” was a manifestation of social care that was generally accepted by the public, while “living in other people’s eyes” was a manifestation of guiding citizens to have their own judgments and values and to advocate for ideological improvement. The comments on 5G and Apple showed that people paid close attention to the development of science and technology in the country and the need for high-tech ways to improve life. Support and encouragement for the Chinese women’s volleyball team and the men’s basketball team played a social role in increasing patriotism.

The younger generation’s ideology in China

One of the hidden themes in the study is the young generation’s language or new literacy, with sample features such as slang or buzzwords they use in daily life. For example, “ liang liang (failure),” “ sha diao (idot),” “ zhong cao (attractive),” “ di biao zui qiang (the most powerful one),” and “ shen xian da jia (competition among the elites)” were frequently cited in their comments; some of these terms are from movies or social media, while some are terms coined in their peer communication. These terms represent their generation and show their uniqueness and differences from their parents’ generations. Behind these terms stand their personal beliefs and ideologies.

In addition, by analyzing the critical thinking ability of college students’ news reviews, the researchers found that college students were prone to express their views and value all civil rights and national sovereignty in their news commentary. Students’ comments were relatively independent, rational, and critical. Fairclough ( 1995 ) argued that the undiscovered information of power, ideology, and language in news reports could be investigated and explained through institutional context and societal context. Because the Chinese ideology is deeply rooted in culture, the power of patriotism or populism was reflected in the college students’ comments:

“It is not about the freedom of the speech. It is about the justice and fairness of one’s comments. The higher a person’s status is, the more responsible he/she should be for his/her words. It may not be a good thing to comment on one’s backyard if one has never lived there (i.e. in China or Hong Kong), right?” (selected comment to the NBA Game news).

“I think the arena being fully seated is a matter of personal choice which cannot be attributed to …, while it is a bit inappropriate to ask the player to sign on the flag of China, as that represents the national identity” (selected comment to the NBA Game news).

From news interviews, the researchers also found that college students’ comments on news generally presented an awareness of social justice, which may represent the younger generation’s attitudes, beliefs, and values in either personal or social cognition (van Dijk, 1995 ). They emphasized objectivity and fairness over subjectivity to no small extent. For example, regarding the news of whether the NBA game tickets were refundable, the students’ comments respected the individual’s right to make decisions. Nevertheless, they also explained that it was inappropriate to sign on the flag of China. Students’ comments on the news Rayza’s airport look were even more concerned with social justice. Moreover, they analyzed the issue from an objective perspective instead of an individual perspective and extended it to the social level, which further showed that current college students are more inclined to social justice.

Critical thinking informing ideological and linguistic choices

One of the most important findings of this study is the complex relationships among critical thinking, ideological beliefs, and linguistic features. We present these complex relationships as shown in Fig. 1 .

*p: personal ideologies; s: social ideologies.

By mapping out different comments, we find that critical thinking works as an analytical and filtering tool to guide commenters to select their ideological beliefs, either personal or social. These personal and social ideological beliefs may diverge or converge. The divergence or convergence of personal and social ideological beliefs may indicate the strength of critical thinking, which, however, may not equal the quality of critical thinking. To be more specific, critical thinking may help commenters present a different perspective from the commonly accepted social perspective, which shows efforts in analyzing a news article and offering their opinions. However, the opinions that differ from widely accepted views may not be weighed as right or wrong or un/acceptable; they may just be different voices.

We argue that these personal and social opinions are representations of ideological beliefs and are fully presented through news comments; news comments are ideology-based. Critical thinking helps commenters choose their personal and social ideologies and then helps them choose linguistic forms they believe fit their news comments. While critical thinking plays a crucial role in choosing specific ideological beliefs and linguistic forms, news topics vary in informing commenters’ critical thinking ability. In the study, we found that some topics may inform divergence between personal and social ideological beliefs, whereas other topics may inform the convergence of the two constructs. We also propose that the way a specific piece of news is framed informs the linguistic form of the news comments, which may arouse a certain sense in the commenters (e.g., a sense of belonging as in/out-group members). Reading these news pieces may stimulate commenters’ critical thinking and then work on the linguistic forms in news comments.

The present study provided an overall account of how linguistic features, ideological beliefs, and critical thinking accounts are revealed through news comments. News comments in China present value propositions and ways of thinking through complex lexical and syntactical structures. The respondents presented power, ideology, inequality, and social justice through their responses to the news, which informed news commentary as a way to serve the social function of the language. The responses also presented the younger generation’s personal ideology through the news comments. However, topics were important in informing these constructs and caused divergences among different comments. One of the critiques that this study, and the CDA studies in general, may receive is the simplistic or even vague description of the methodology (Wodak, 2006 ) because there is currently “no accepted canon of data collection” (Wodak and Meyer, 2015 ). Instead, we tried to provide careful systemic analysis and separated description and interpretation (Wodak and Meyer, 2015 ). For future studies, we believe that further analysis of how critical thinking may work with personal and social ideologies is necessary. Additionally, it is worthwhile to study the effects of other cognitive attributes on language and ideologies to extend the SCA domain.

Data availability

The data analyzed and generated are included in the paper.

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Acknowledgements

The paper is funded through Graduate Program Research Fund (# YJG2020403) at Dalian Maritime University. In addition, it is also partially funded through DMU Xinhai Scholar Research Fund (#02500805). Our sincere thanks go to our undergraduate and graduate students who were keen on helping us with data collection and analysis.

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Gao, Y., Zeng, G. Exploring linguistic features, ideologies, and critical thinking in Chinese news comments. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8 , 39 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00715-y

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To Improve Critical Thinking, Don’t Fall into the Urgency Trap

Too often at work, people rely on expertise and past experiences to jump to a conclusion. Yet research consistently shows that when we rush decisions, we often regret them—even if they end up being correct. [i]

Why we hasten decision making is quite clear. We’re inundated with incessant distractions that compete for our attention, and, at the same time, we’re facing profound pressure to go faster and drive our businesses forward, even when the path ahead is unclear.

In the aftermath of information overwhelm, evolving technology, and rapidly changing business environments, people often unconsciously fall into a pernicious paradox called the “urgency trap.”

The Urgency Trap

The urgency trap, which can be defined as the habitual, unbridled, and counterproductive tendencies to rush through decision making when under the pressure of too many demands, is a paradox because it limits the very thing that could help us be more innovative, efficient, and effective: Our critical thinking.

The ability to analyze and effectively break down an issue to make a decision or solve a problem in novel ways is sorely lacking in today’s workforce, with most employers reporting that their employees’ critical thinking skills are average at best. [ii]

The good news? Critical thinking is a teachable skill, and one that any person can learn to make time for when making decisions. To improve and devote time for critical thinking at work, consider the following best practices.

1. Question assumptions and biases

Consider this common scenario: A team is discussing a decision that they must make quickly. The team’s options—and the arguments for and against them—have been assembled, but no clear evidence supports a particular course of action. Under pressure to move fast, the team relies on their expertise and past experiences to rapidly provide a solution. Yet, in the months following their decision, the issues that prompted the original discussion persist, and the team wonders why.

The issue here may be that the team failed to question their own assumptions and biases. Indeed, when we view situations solely based on our own personal experiences and beliefs, we limit our options and provide solutions that are often short-sighted or superficial. [iii] To improve critical thinking skills, we must step back and ask ourselves,

• “Am I seeking out information that confirms my pre-conceived idea?”
• “Am I perceiving a past experience as more predictable than it actually was?”
• “Am I overemphasizing information that comes to mind quickly, instead of calculating other probabilities?”

2. Reason through logic

When presented with an argument, it is important to analyze it logically in order to determine whether or not it is valid. This means looking at the evidence that is being used to support the argument and determining whether or not it actually does support the conclusion that is being drawn.

Additionally, consider the source of the information. Is it credible? Trustworthy? Finally, be aware of common logical fallacies people tend to use when trying to speed up decision making, such as false dilemma (erroneously limiting available options) and hasty generalizations (making a claim based on a few examples rather than substantial proof).

3. Listen actively and openly

When we’re in a rush to make a decision, we often focus more on how we want to respond rather than what the speaker is saying. Active listening, on the other hand, is a critical thinking skill that involves paying close attention to what someone else is saying with the intent to learn, and then asking questions to clarify and deepen understanding.

When engaging in active listening, it’s important to avoid interrupting and instead allow the other person to fully express their thoughts. Additionally, resist the urge to judge or criticize what the other person is saying. Rather, focus on truly understanding their perspective. This may mean practicing open-mindedness by considering new ideas, even if they challenge existing beliefs. By keeping an open mind, this ensures that all sides of an issue are considered before coming to a conclusion.

4. Ask better questions

In an article for Harvard Business Review, John Coleman, author of the HBR Guide to Crafting Your Purpose , writes, “At the heart of critical thinking is the ability to formulate deep, different, and effective questions.” [iv]

To ask better questions, first consider the audience for the question (who is hearing the question and who might respond?) and the purpose (what is the goal of asking this question?). Then, approach queries with rigor and curiosity by asking questions that:

• Are open-ended yet short and direct (e.g., “How might you help me think about this differently?”)
• Challenge a group’s conventional thinking (e.g., “What if we tried a new approach?”)
• Help others reconsider their first principles or hypotheses (e.g., “As we look at the data, how might we reconsider our initial proposed solution?”)
• Encourage further discussion and analysis (e.g., “How can we deepen our understanding of this issue?”)
• Thoughtfully follow up on the solution (e.g., “How do we feel about the progress so far?”)

5. Create space for deliberation

The recommendations outlined thus far are behaviors and capabilities people can use in the moment, but sometimes, the best solutions are formulated after consideration. In fact, research shows that a deliberate process often leads to better conclusions. [v] And sleep has even been proven to help the brain assimilate a problem and see it more clearly. [vi]

When issues are complex, it’s important to find ways to resist unnecessary urgency. Start by mapping out a process that allows several days or longer to sit with a problem. Then, create space in the day to formulate in quiet reflection, whether that’s replacing your first thirty minutes in the morning with thinking instead of checking email, or going on a walk midday, or simply journaling for a few moments before bed.

Critical Thinking Cannot Be Overlooked

In the face of rapidly-evolving business environments, the ability to make smart decisions quickly is one of a company’s greatest assets—but to move fast, people must first slow down to reason through pressing issues, ask thoughtful questions, and evaluate a topic from multiple angles.

To learn more about how organizations can enhance their critical thinking and decision-making skills, download the full paper: Who Is Really Making the Decisions in Your Organization — and How?

[i] Grant Halvorson, Heidi, “Quick Decisions Create Regret, Even When They Are Good Decisions,” Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/1758386/quick-decisions-create-regret-even-when-they-are-good-decisions .

[ii] Plummer, Matt, “A Short Guide to Building Your Team’s Critical Thinking Skills,” Harvard Business Review, October 2019. https://hbr.org/2019/10/a-short-guide-to-building-your-teams-critical-thinking-skills .

[iii] Benjamin Enke, Uri Gneezy, Brian Hall, David Martin, Vadim Nelidov, Theo Offerman, and Jeroen van de Ve, “Cognitive Biases: Mistakes or Missing Stakes?” Harvard Business School, 2021. https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/21-102_1ed838f2-8ef3-4eec-b543-d00eb1efbe10.pdf

[iv] Coleman, John, “Critical Thinking Is About Asking Better Questions,” Harvard Business Review, April 2022. https://hbr.org/2022/04/critical-thinking-is-about-asking-better-questions .

[v] Markovitz, Daniel, “How to Avoid Rushing to Solutions When Problem-Solving,” Harvard Business Review, November 2020. https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-to-avoid-rushing-to-solutions-when-problem-solving .

[vi] Miller, Jared, “Does ‘Sleeping On It’ Really Work?” WebMD. https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/does-sleeping-on-it-really-work .

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Critical thinking is needed throughout life, not just in science.

We define scientific literacy too narrowly: the tools of science are applicable to everything from economics to terrorism

9 December 2015

(Image: Claire Cocano/Picturetank)

HERE’S a game to play next time you catch the news headlines. Count how many would dissolve away or be markedly different if the people writing them had evaluated the evidence more critically. Your count will probably be alarmingly high.

We have a long tradition of allowing civic affairs to be settled by persuasive rhetoric. That is inadequate for our modern society. Science and technology shape our world and, as a society, we need to make well-reasoned and scientifically literate choices about everything from genetic engineering to geoengineering.

“Using rhetoric to settle civic affairs is inadequate for running our modern society”

But many of the tools used to make science-heavy decisions are also needed to properly evaluate a much broader range of subjects: in particular, critical thinking and numerical analysis. A basic grasp of statistics and probability, for instance, is key to judging the risk from terrorism, say, or how to invest your money (see “ How to outsmart your irrational brain “).

But the desired combination of scientific literacy and critical thinking remains rare in public discourse. Perhaps that is because we hope children will learn to evaluate claims rationally if we teach them science. That works for some, but all too often the reaction is: “I’ll never need to use this once I’ve left school.”

That’s being taken up by the Programme for International Student Assessment. The PISA tests, which attempt to compare student performance around the world, are always controversial, but their central concern is sound: “What is important for citizens to know and be able to do?” This year, they are focused on the scientific literacy of 15-year-olds from more than 70 states and regions around the world. But then what exactly is scientific literacy?

PISA’s lengthy definition begins with “an individual’s scientific knowledge and use of that knowledge to identify questions” and ends with “willingness to engage in science-related issues, and with the issues of science, as a reflective citizen”.

We have made progress on the first part of this definition. In 1996, a survey found that more than half of the US population didn’t know Earth orbits the sun; few even knew what that might mean. But more recent polls suggest that US scientific literacy has improved greatly. A Pew survey released in September concluded that “most Americans can answer basic questions about several scientific terms and concepts”: that Earth’s core is its hottest part, for example, or that uranium is needed for nuclear energy and weapons.

But mastery of facts alone is not enough for the internet age. Much of the copious online rhetoric is more viral than factual, so it is just as important that we know how to evaluate sources of information, and how to tell correlation from causation, and opinion from fact – in matters both obviously scientific and otherwise.

This is where we’re falling short of the tail end of PISA’s definition. Kids who don’t see the point of science often lack chances to hone their critical thinking toolkits, particularly their numerical sides. And textbook knowledge doesn’t translate easily to practice: cell biology can seem very remote when deciding who’s really worth listening to about vaccination.

This shortfall is being addressed: in UK schools, for example, the Twenty First Century Science GCSE module covers issues of relevance to everyone, whatever their scientific ambitions (or lack of them). But our societies still have a long way to go when it comes to reading between the headlines – or rewriting them.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Critical thinking”

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The Use of Critical Thinking to Identify Fake News: A Systematic Literature Review

Paul machete.

Department of Informatics, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, 0001 South Africa

Marita Turpin

With the large amount of news currently being published online, the ability to evaluate the credibility of online news has become essential. While there are many studies involving fake news and tools on how to detect it, there is a limited amount of work that focuses on the use of information literacy to assist people to critically access online information and news. Critical thinking, as a form of information literacy, provides a means to critically engage with online content, for example by looking for evidence to support claims and by evaluating the plausibility of arguments. The purpose of this study is to investigate the current state of knowledge on the use of critical thinking to identify fake news. A systematic literature review (SLR) has been performed to identify previous studies on evaluating the credibility of news, and in particular to see what has been done in terms of the use of critical thinking to evaluate online news. During the SLR’s sifting process, 22 relevant studies were identified. Although some of these studies referred to information literacy, only three explicitly dealt with critical thinking as a means to identify fake news. The studies on critical thinking noted critical thinking as an essential skill for identifying fake news. The recommendation of these studies was that information literacy be included in academic institutions, specifically to encourage critical thinking.

Introduction

The information age has brought a significant increase in available sources of information; this is in line with the unparalleled increase in internet availability and connection, in addition to the accessibility of technological devices [ 1 ]. People no longer rely on television and print media alone for obtaining news, but increasingly make use of social media and news apps. The variety of information sources that we have today has contributed to the spread of alternative facts [ 1 ]. With over 1.8 billion active users per month in 2016 [ 2 ], Facebook accounted for 20% of total traffic to reliable websites and up to 50% of all the traffic to fake news sites [ 3 ]. Twitter comes second to Facebook, with over 400 million active users per month [ 2 ]. Posts on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter spread rapidly due to how they attempt to grab the readers’ attention as quickly as possible, with little substantive information provided, and thus create a breeding ground for the dissemination of fake news [ 4 ].

While social media is a convenient way of accessing news and staying connected to friends and family, it is not easy to distinguish real news from fake news on social media [ 5 ]. Social media continues to contribute to the increasing distribution of user-generated information; this includes hoaxes, false claims, fabricated news and conspiracy theories, with primary sources being social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter [ 6 ]. This means that any person who is in possession of a device, which can connect to the internet, is potentially a consumer or distributor of fake news. While social media platforms and search engines do not encourage people to believe the information being circulated, they are complicit in people’s propensity to believe the information they come across on these platforms, without determining their validity [ 6 ]. The spread of fake news can cause a multitude of damages to the subject; varying from reputational damage of an individual, to having an effect on the perceived value of a company [ 7 ].

The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of critical thinking methods to detect news stories that are untrue or otherwise help to develop a critical attitude to online news. This work was performed by means of a systematic literature review (SLR). The paper is presented as follows. The next section provides background information on fake news, its importance in the day-to-day lives of social media users and how information literacy and critical thinking can be used to identify fake news. Thereafter, the SLR research approach is discussed. Following this, the findings of the review are reported, first in terms of descriptive statistics and the in terms of a thematic analysis of the identified studies. The paper ends with the Conclusion and recommendations.

Background: Fake News, Information Literacy and Critical Thinking

This section discusses the history of fake news, the fake news that we know today and the role of information literacy can be used to help with the identification of fake news. It also provides a brief definition of critical thinking.

The History of Fake News

Although fake news has received increased attention recently, the term has been used by scholars for many years [ 4 ]. Fake news emerged from the tradition of yellow journalism of the 1890s, which can be described as a reliance on the familiar aspects of sensationalism—crime news, scandal and gossip, divorces and sex, and stress upon the reporting of disasters, sports sensationalism as well as possibly satirical news [ 5 ]. The emergence of online news in the early 2000s raised concerns, among them being that people who share similar ideologies may form “echo chambers” where they can filter out alternative ideas [ 2 ]. This emergence came about as news media transformed from one that was dominated by newspapers printed by authentic and trusted journalists to one where online news from an untrusted source is believed by many [ 5 ]. The term later grew to describe “satirical news shows”, “parody news shows” or “fake-news comedy shows” where a television show, or segment on a television show was dedicated to political satire [ 4 ]. Some of these include popular television shows such as The Daily Show (now with Trevor Noah), Saturday Night Live ’s “The Weekend Update” segment, and other similar shows such as Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert [ 4 ]. News stories in these shows were labelled “fake” not because of their content, but for parodying network news for the use of sarcasm, and using comedy as a tool to engage real public issues [ 4 ]. The term “Fake News” further became prominent during the course of the 2016 US presidential elections, as members of the opposing parties would post incorrect news headlines in order to sway the decision of voters [ 6 ].

Fake News Today

The term fake news has a more literal meaning today [ 4 ]. The Macquarie Dictionary named fake news the word of the year for 2016 [ 8 ]. In this dictionary, fake news is described it as a word that captures a fascinating evolution in the creation of deceiving content, also allowing people to believe what they see fit. There are many definitions for the phrase, however, a concise description of the term can be found in Paskin [ 4 ] who states that certain news articles originating from either social media or mainstream (online or offline) platforms, that are not factual, but are presented as such and are not satirical, are considered fake news. In some instances, editorials, reports, and exposés may be knowingly disseminating information with intent to deceive for the purposes of monetary or political benefit [ 4 ].

A distinction amongst three types of fake news can be made on a conceptual level, namely: serious fabrications, hoaxes and satire [ 3 ]. Serious fabrications are explained as news items written on false information, including celebrity gossip. Hoaxes refer to false information provided via social media, aiming to be syndicated by traditional news platforms. Lastly, satire refers to the use of humour in the news to imitate real news, but through irony and absurdity. Some examples of famous satirical news platforms in circulation in the modern day are The Onion and The Beaverton , when contrasted with real news publishers such as The New York Times [ 3 ].

Although there are many studies involving fake news and tools on how to detect it, there is a limited amount of academic work that focuses on the need to encourage information literacy so that people are able to critically access the information they have been presented, in order to make better informed decisions [ 9 ].

Stein-Smith [ 5 ] urges that information/media literacy has become a more critical skill since the appearance of the notion of fake news has become public conversation. Information literacy is no longer a nice-to-have proficiency but a requirement for interpreting news headlines and participation in public discussions. It is essential for academic institutions of higher learning to present information literacy courses that will empower students and staff members with the prerequisite tools to identify, select, understand and use trustworthy information [ 1 ]. Outside of its academic uses, information literacy is also a lifelong skill with multiple applications in everyday life [ 5 ]. The choices people make in their lives, and opinions they form need to be informed by the appropriate interpretation of correct, opportune, and significant information [ 5 ].

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking covers a broad range of skills that includes the following: verbal reasoning skills; argument analysis; thinking as hypothesis testing; dealing with likelihood and uncertainties; and decision making and problem solving skills [ 10 ]. For the purpose of this study, where we are concerned with the evaluation of the credibility of online news, the following definition will be used: critical thinking is “the ability to analyse and evaluate arguments according to their soundness and credibility, respond to arguments and reach conclusions through deduction from given information” [ 11 ]. In this study, we want to investigate how the skills mentioned by [ 11 ] can be used as part of information literacy, to better identify fake news.

The next section presents the research approach that was followed to perform the SLR.

Research Method

This section addresses the research question, the search terms that were applied to a database in relation to the research question, as well as the search criteria used on the search results. The following research question was addressed in this SLR:

• What is the role of critical thinking in identifying fake news, according to previous studies?

The research question was identified in accordance to the research topic. The intention of the research question is to determine if the identified studies in this review provide insights into the use of critical thinking to evaluate the credibility of online news and in particular to identify fake news.

Delimitations.

In the construction of this SLR, the following definitions of fake news and other related terms have been excluded, following the suggestion of [ 2 ]:

• Unintentional reporting mistakes;
• Rumours that do not originate from a particular news article;
• Conspiracy theories;
• Satire that is unlikely to be misconstrued as factual;
• False statements by politicians; and
• Reports that are slanted or misleading, but not outright false.

Search Terms.

The database tool used to extract sources to conduct the SLR was Google Scholar ( https://scholar.google.com ). The process for extracting the sources involved executing the search string on Google Scholar and the retrieval of the articles and their meta-data into a tool called Mendeley, which was used for reference management.

The search string used to retrieve the sources was defined below:

(“critical think*” OR “critically (NEAR/2) reason*” OR “critical (NEAR/2) thought*” OR “critical (NEAR/2) judge*” AND “fake news” AND (identify* OR analyse* OR find* OR describe* OR review).

To construct the search criteria, the following factors have been taken into consideration: the research topic guided the search string, as the key words were used to create the base search criteria. The second step was to construct the search string according to the search engine requirements on Google Scholar.

Selection Criteria.

The selection criteria outlined the rules applied in the SLR to identify sources, narrow down the search criteria and focus the study on a specific topic. The inclusion and exclusion criteria are outlined in Table  1 to show which filters were applied to remove irrelevant sources.

Table 1.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria for paper selection

Source Selection.

The search criteria were applied on the online database and 91 papers were retrieved. The criteria in Table  1 were used on the search results in order to narrow down the results to appropriate papers only.

PRISMA Flowchart.

The selection criteria included four stages of filtering and this is depicted in Fig.  1 . In then Identification stage, the 91 search results from Google Scholar were returned and 3 sources were derived from the sources already identified from the search results, making a total of 94 available sources. In the screening stage, no duplicates were identified. After a thorough screening of the search results, which included looking at the availability of the article (free to use), 39 in total records were available – to which 55 articles were excluded. Of the 39 articles, nine were excluded based on their titles and abstract being irrelevant to the topic in the eligibility stage. A final list of 22 articles was included as part of this SLR. As preparation for the data analysis, a data extraction table was made that classified each article according to the following: article author; article title; theme (a short summary of the article); year; country; and type of publication. The data extraction table assisted in the analysis of findings as presented in the next section.

PRISMA flowchart

Analysis of Findings

Descriptive statistics.

Due to the limited number of relevant studies, the information search did not have a specified start date. Articles were included up to 31 August 2019. The majority of the papers found were published in 2017 (8 papers) and 2018 (9 papers). This is in line with the term “fake news” being announced the word of the year in the 2016 [ 8 ].

The selected papers were classified into themes. Figure  2 is a Venn diagram that represents the overlap of articles by themes across the review. Articles that fall under the “fake news” theme had the highest number of occurrences, with 11 in total. Three articles focused mainly on “Critical Thinking”, and “Information Literacy” was the main focus of four articles. Two articles combined all three topics of critical thinking, information literacy, and fake news.

Venn diagram depicting the overlap of articles by main focus

An analysis of the number of articles published per country indicate that the US had a dominating amount of articles published on this topic, a total of 17 articles - this represents 74% of the selected articles in this review. The remaining countries where articles were published are Australia, Germany, Ireland, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden - with each having one article published.

In terms of publication type, 15 of the articles were journal articles, four were reports, one was a thesis, one was a magazine article and one, a web page.

Discussion of Themes

The following emerged from a thematic analysis of the articles.

Fake News and Accountability.

With the influence that social media has on the drive of fake news [ 2 ], who then becomes responsible for the dissemination and intake of fake news by the general population? The immediate assumption is that in the digital age, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be able to curate information, or do some form of fact-checking when posts are uploaded onto their platforms [ 12 ], but that leans closely to infringing on freedom of speech. While different authors agree that there need to be measures in place for the minimisation of fake news being spread [ 12 , 13 ], where that accountability lies differs between the authors. Metaxas and Mustafaraj [ 13 ] aimed to develop algorithms or plug-ins that can assist in trust and postulated that consumers should be able to identify misinformation, thus making an informed decision on whether to share that information or not. Lazer et al. [ 12 ] on the other hand, believe the onus should be on the platform owners to put restrictions on the kind of data distributed. Considering that the work by Metaxas and Mustafaraj [ 13 ] was done seven years ago, one can conclude that the use of fact-checking algorithms/plug-ins has not been successful in curbing the propulsion of fake news.

Fake News and Student Research.

There were a total of four articles that had a focus on student research in relation to fake news. Harris, Paskin and Stein-Smith [ 4 , 5 , 14 ] all agree that students do not have the ability to discern between real and fake news. A Stanford History Education Group study reveals that students are not geared up for distinguishing real from fake news [ 4 ]. Most students are able to perform a simple Google search for information; however, they are unable to identify the author of an online source, or if the information is misleading [ 14 ]. Furthermore, students are not aware of the benefits of learning information literacy in school in equipping them with the skills required to accurately identify fake news [ 5 ]. At the Metropolitan Campus of Fairleigh Dickson University, librarians have undertaken the role of providing training on information literacy skills for identifying fake news [ 5 ].

Fake News and Social Media.

A number of authors [ 6 , 15 ] are in agreement that social media, the leading source of news, is the biggest driving force for fake news. It provides substantial advantage to broadcast manipulated information. It is an open platform of unfiltered editors and open to contributions from all. According to Nielsen and Graves as well as Janetzko, [ 6 , 15 ], people are unable to identify fake news correctly. They are likely to associate fake news with low quality journalism than false information designed to mislead. Two articles, [ 15 ] and [ 6 ] discussed the role of critical thinking when interacting on social media. Social media presents information to us that has been filtered according to what we already consume, thereby making it a challenge for consumers to think critically. The study by Nielsen and Graves [ 6 ] confirm that students’ failure to verify incorrect online sources requires urgent attention as this could indicate that students are a simple target for presenting manipulated information.

Fake News That Drive Politics.

Two studies mention the effect of social and the spread of fake news, and how it may have propelled Donald Trump to win the US election in 2016 [ 2 , 16 ]. Also, [ 8 ] and [ 2 ] mention how a story on the Pope supporting Trump in his presidential campaign, was widely shared (more than a million times) on Facebook in 2016. These articles also point out how in the information age, fact-checking has become relatively easy, but people are more likely to trust their intuition on news stories they consume, rather than checking the reliability of a story. The use of paid trolls and Russian bots to populate social media feeds with misinformation in an effort to swing the US presidential election in Donald Trump’s favour, is highlighted [ 16 ]. The creation of fake news, with the use of alarmist headlines (“click bait”), generates huge traffic into the original websites, which drives up advertising revenue [ 2 ]. This means content creators are compelled to create fake news, to drive ad revenue on their websites - even though they may not be believe in the fake news themselves [ 2 ].

Information Literacy.

Information literacy is when a person has access to information, and thus can process the parts they need, and create ways in which to best use the information [ 1 ]. Teaching students the importance of information literacy skills is key, not only for identifying fake news but also for navigating life aspects that require managing and scrutinising information, as discussed by [ 1 , 17 ], and [ 9 ]. Courtney [ 17 ] highlights how journalism students, above students from other disciplines, may need to have some form of information literacy incorporated into their syllabi to increase their awareness of fake news stories, creating a narrative of being objective and reliable news creators. Courtney assessed different universities that teach journalism and media-related studies, and established that students generally lack awareness on how useful library services are in offering services related to information literacy. Courtney [ 17 ] and Rose-Wiles [ 9 ] discuss how the use of library resources should be normalised to students. With millennials and generation Z having social media as their first point of contact, Rose-Wiles [ 9 ] urges universities, colleges and other academic research institutes to promote the use of more library resources than those from the internet, to encourage students to lean on reliable sources. Overall, this may prove difficult, therefore Rose-Wiles [ 9 ] proposes that by teaching information literacy skills and critical thinking, students can use these skills to apply in any situation or information source.

Referred to as “truth decay”, people have reached a point where they no longer need to agree with facts [ 18 ]. Due to political polarisation, the general public hold the opinion of being part of an oppressed group of people, and therefore will believe a political leader who appeals to that narrative [ 18 ]. There needs to be tangible action put into driving civil engagement, to encourage people to think critically, analyse information and not believe everything they read.

Critical Thinking.

Only three of the articles had critical thinking as a main theme. Bronstein et al. [ 19 ] discuss how certain dogmatic and religious beliefs create a tendency in individuals to belief any information given, without them having a need to interrogate the information further and then deciding ion its veracity. The article further elaborates how these individuals are also more likely to engage in conspiracy theories, and tend to rationalise absurd events. Bronstein et al.’s [ 19 ] study conclude that dogmatism and religious fundamentalism highly correlate with a belief in fake news. Their study [ 19 ] suggests the use of interventions that aim to increase open-minded thinking, and also increase analytical thinking as a way to help religious, curb belief in fake news. Howlett [ 20 ] describes critical thinking as evidence-based practice, which is taking the theories of the skills and concepts of critical thinking and converting those for use in everyday applications. Jackson [ 21 ] explains how the internet purposely prides itself in being a platform for “unreviewed content”, due to the idea that people may not see said content again, therefore it needs to be attention-grabbing for this moment, and not necessarily accurate. Jackson [ 21 ] expands that social media affected critical thinking in how it changed the view on published information, what is now seen as old forms of information media. This then presents a challenge to critical thinking in that a large portion of information found on the internet is not only unreliable, it may also be false. Jackson [ 21 ] posits that one of the biggest dangers to critical thinking may be that people have a sense of perceived power for being able to find the others they seek with a simple web search. People are no longer interested in evaluation the credibility of the information they receive and share, and thus leading to the propagation of fake news [ 21 ].

Discussion of Findings

The aggregated data in this review has provided insight into how fake news is perceived, the level of attention it is receiving and the shortcomings of people when identifying fake news. Since the increase in awareness of fake news in 2016, there has been an increase in academic focus on the subject, with most of the articles published between 2017 and 2018. Fifty percent of the articles released focused on the subject of fake news, with 18% reflecting on information literacy, and only 13% on critical thinking.

The thematic discussion grouped and synthesised the articles in this review according to the main themes of fake news, information literacy and critical thinking. The Fake news and accountability discussion raised the question of who becomes accountable for the spreading of fake news between social media and the user. The articles presented a conclusion that fact-checking algorithms are not successful in reducing the dissemination of fake news. The discussion also included a focus on fake news and student research , whereby a Stanford History Education Group study revealed that students are not well educated in thinking critically and identifying real from fake news [ 4 ]. The Fake news and social media discussion provided insight on social media is the leading source of news as well as a contributor to fake news. It provides a challenge for consumers who are not able to think critically about online news, or have basic information literacy skills that can aid in identifying fake news. Fake news that drive politics highlighted fake news’ role in politics, particularly the 2016 US presidential elections and the influence it had on the voters [ 22 ].

Information literacy related publications highlighted the need for educating the public on being able to identify fake news, as well as the benefits of having information literacy as a life skill [ 1 , 9 , 17 ]. It was shown that students are often misinformed about the potential benefits of library services. The authors suggested that university libraries should become more recognised and involved as role-players in providing and assisting with information literacy skills.

The articles that focused on critical thinking pointed out two areas where a lack of critical thinking prevented readers from discerning between accurate and false information. In the one case, it was shown that people’s confidence in their ability to find information online gave made them overly confident about the accuracy of that information [ 21 ]. In the other case, it was shown that dogmatism and religious fundamentalism, which led people to believe certain fake news, were associated with a lack of critical thinking and a questioning mind-set [ 21 ].

The articles that focused on information literacy and critical thinking were in agreement on the value of promoting and teaching these skills, in particular to the university students who were often the subjects of the studies performed.

This review identified 22 articles that were synthesised and used as evidence to determine the role of critical thinking in identifying fake news. The articles were classified according to year of publication, country of publication, type of publication and theme. Based on the descriptive statistics, fake news has been a growing trend in recent years, predominantly in the US since the presidential election in 2016. The research presented in most of the articles was aimed at the assessment of students’ ability to identify fake news. The various studies were consistent in their findings of research subjects’ lack of ability to distinguish between true and fake news.

Information literacy emerged as a new theme from the studies, with Rose-Wiles [ 9 ] advising academic institutions to teach information literacy and encourage students to think critically when accessing online news. The potential role of university libraries to assist in not only teaching information literacy, but also assisting student to evaluate the credibility of online information, was highlighted. The three articles that explicitly dealt with critical thinking, all found critical thinking to be lacking among their research subjects. They further indicated how this lack of critical thinking could be linked to people’s inability to identify fake news.

This review has pointed out people’s general inability to identify fake news. It highlighted the importance of information literacy as well as critical thinking, as essential skills to evaluate the credibility of online information.

The limitations in this review include the use of students as the main participants in most of the research - this would indicate a need to shift the academic focus towards having the general public as participants. This is imperative because anyone who possesses a mobile device is potentially a contributor or distributor of fake news.

For future research, it is suggested that the value of the formal teaching of information literacy at universities be further investigated, as a means to assist students in assessing the credibility of online news. Given the very limited number of studies on the role of critical thinking to identify fake news, this is also an important area for further research.

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“Too many facts, too little conceptualizing, too much memorizing, and too little thinking.” ~  Paul Hurd , the Organizer in Developing Blueprints for Institutional Change

Introduction The question at issue in this paper is: What is the current state of critical thinking in higher education?

Sadly, studies of higher education demonstrate three disturbing, but hardly novel, facts:

• Most college faculty at all levels lack a substantive concept of critical thinking.
• Most college faculty don’t realize that they lack a substantive concept of critical thinking, believe that they sufficiently understand it, and assume they are already teaching students it.  
• Lecture, rote memorization, and (largely ineffective) short-term study habits are still the norm in college instruction and learning today.

These three facts, taken together, represent serious obstacles to essential, long-term institutional change, for only when administrative and faculty leaders grasp the nature, implications, and power of a robust concept of critical thinking — as well as gain insight into the negative implications of its absence — are they able to orchestrate effective professional development. When faculty have a vague notion of critical thinking, or reduce it to a single-discipline model (as in teaching critical thinking through a “logic” or a “study skills” paradigm), it impedes their ability to identify ineffective, or develop more effective, teaching practices. It prevents them from making the essential connections (both within subjects and across them), connections that give order and substance to teaching and learning.

This paper highlights the depth of the problem and its solution — a comprehensive, substantive concept of critical thinking fostered across the curriculum. As long as we rest content with a fuzzy concept of critical thinking or an overly narrow one, we will not be able to effectively teach for it. Consequently, students will continue to leave our colleges without the intellectual skills necessary for reasoning through complex issues.

Part One: An Initial Look at the Difference Between a Substantive and Non-Substantive Concept of Critical Thinking

Faculty Lack a Substantive Concept of Critical Thinking

Studies demonstrate that most college faculty lack a substantive concept of critical thinking. Consequently they do not (and cannot) use it as a central organizer in the design of instruction. It does not inform their conception of the student’s role as learner. It does not affect how they conceptualize their own role as instructors. They do not link it to the essential thinking that defines the content they teach. They, therefore, usually teach content separate from the thinking students need to engage in if they are to take ownership of that content. They teach history but not historical thinking. They teach biology, but not biological thinking. They teach math, but not mathematical thinking. They expect students to do analysis, but have no clear idea of how to teach students the elements of that analysis. They want students to use intellectual standards in their thinking, but have no clear conception of what intellectual standards they want their students to use or how to articulate them. They are unable to describe the intellectual traits (dispositions) presupposed for intellectual discipline. They have no clear idea of the relation between critical thinking and creativity, problem-solving, decision-making, or communication. They do not understand the role that thinking plays in understanding content. They are often unaware that didactic teaching is ineffective. They don’t see why students fail to make the basic concepts of the discipline their own. They lack classroom teaching strategies that would enable students to master content and become skilled learners.

Most faculty have these problems, yet with little awareness that they do. The majority of college faculty consider their teaching strategies just fine, no matter what the data reveal. Whatever problems exist in their instruction they see as the fault of students or beyond their control.

Studies Reveal That Critical Thinking Is Rare in the College Classroom Research demonstrates that, contrary to popular faculty belief, critical thinking is not fostered in the typical college classroom. In a meta-analysis of the literature on teaching effectiveness in higher education, Lion Gardiner, in conjunction with ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education (1995) documented the following disturbing patterns: “Faculty aspire to develop students’ thinking skills, but research consistently shows that in practice we tend to aim at facts and concepts in the disciplines, at the lowest cognitive levels, rather than development of intellect or values."

Numerous studies of college classrooms reveal that, rather than actively involving our students in learning, we lecture, even though lectures are not nearly as effective as other means for developing cognitive skills. In addition, students may be attending to lectures only about one-half of their time in class, and retention from lectures is low.

Studies suggest our methods often fail to dislodge students’ misconceptions and ensure learning of complex, abstract concepts. Capacity for problem solving is limited by our use of inappropriately simple practice exercises.

Classroom tests often set the standard for students’ learning. As with instruction, however, we tend to emphasize recall of memorized factual information rather than intellectual challenge. Taken together with our preference for lecturing, our tests may be reinforcing our students’ commonly fact-oriented memory learning, of limited value to either them or society.

Faculty agree almost universally that the development of students’ higher-order intellectual or cognitive abilities is the most important educational task of colleges and universities. These abilities underpin our students’ perceptions of the world and the consequent decisions they make. Specifically, critical thinking – the capacity to evaluate skillfully and fairly the quality of evidence and detect error, hypocrisy, manipulation, dissembling, and bias – is central to both personal success and national needs.

A 1972 study of 40,000 faculty members by the American Council on Education found that 97 percent of the respondents indicated the most important goal of undergraduate education is to foster students’ ability to think critically.

Process-oriented instructional orientations “have long been more successful than conventional instruction in fostering effective movement from concrete to formal reasoning. Such programs emphasize students’ active involvement in learning and cooperative work with other students and de-emphasize lectures . . .”

Gardiner’s summary of the research coincides with the results of a large study (Paul, et. al. 1997) of 38 public colleges and universities and 28 private ones focused on the question: To what extent are faculty teaching for critical thinking?

The study included randomly selected faculty from colleges and universities across California, and encompassed prestigious universities such as Stanford, Cal Tech, USC, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and the California State University System. Faculty answered both closed and open-ended questions in a 40-50 minute interview.

By direct statement or by implication, most faculty claimed that they permeated their instruction with an emphasis on critical thinking and that the students internalized the concepts in their courses as a result. Yet only the rare interviewee mentioned the importance of students thinking clearly, accurately, precisely, relevantly, or logically, etc... Very few mentioned any of the basic skills of thought such as the ability to clarify questions; gather relevant data; reason to logical or valid conclusions; identify key assumptions; trace significant implications, or enter without distortion into alternative points of view. Intellectual traits of mind, such as intellectual humility, intellectual perseverance, intellectual responsibility, etc . . . were rarely mentioned by the interviewees. Consider the following key results from the study:

• Though the overwhelming majority of faculty claimed critical thinking to be a primary objective of their instruction (89%), only a small minority could give a clear explanation of what critical thinking is (19%). Furthermore, according to their answers, only 9% of the respondents were clearly teaching for critical thinking on a typical day in class.
• Though the overwhelming majority (78%) claimed that their students lacked appropriate intellectual standards (to use in assessing their thinking), and 73% considered that students learning to assess their own work was of primary importance, only a very small minority (8%) could enumerate any intellectual criteria or standards they required of students or could give an intelligible explanation of those criteria and standards.
• While 50% of those interviewed said that they explicitly distinguish critical thinking skills from traits, only 8% were able to provide a clear conception of the critical thinking skills they thought were most important for their students to develop. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority (75%) provided either minimal or vague allusion (33%) or no illusion at all (42%) to intellectual traits of mind.
• Although the majority (67%) said that their concept of critical thinking is largely explicit in their thinking, only 19% could elaborate on their concept of thinking.
• Although the vast majority (89%) stated that critical thinking was of primary importance to their instruction, 77% of the respondents had little, limited or no conception of how to reconcile content coverage with the fostering of critical thinking.
• Although the overwhelming majority (81%) felt that their department’s graduates develop a good or high level of critical thinking ability while in their program, only 20% said that their departments had a shared approach to critical thinking, and only 9% were able to clearly articulate how they would assess the extent to which a faculty member was or was not fostering critical thinking. The remaining respondents had a limited conception or no conception at all of how to do this.

A Substantive Conception of Critical Thinking

If we understand critical thinking substantively, we not only explain the idea explicitly to our students, but we use it to give order and meaning to virtually everything we do as teachers and learners. We use it to organize the design of instruction. It informs how we conceptualize our students as learners. It determines how we conceptualize our role as instructors. It enables us to understand and explain the thinking that defines the content we teach.

When we understand critical thinking at a deep level, we realize that we must teach content through thinking, not content, and then thinking. We model the thinking that students need to formulate if they are to take ownership of the content. We teach history as historical thinking. We teach biology as biological thinking. We teach math as mathematical thinking. We expect students to analyze the thinking that is the content, and then to assess the thinking using intellectual standards. We foster the intellectual traits (dispositions) essential to critical thinking. We teach students to use critical thinking concepts as tools in entering into any system of thought, into any subject or discipline. We teach students to construct in their own minds the concepts that define the discipline. We acquire an array of classroom strategies that enable students to master content using their thinking and to become skilled learners.

The concept of critical thinking, rightly understood, ties together much of what we need to understand as teachers and learners. Properly understood, it leads to a framework for institutional change. For a deeper understanding of critical thinking see The Thinker’s Guide Series , the book, Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning and Your Life , and the Foundation For Critical Thinking Library.

To exemplify my point, The Thinker’s Guide Series consists in a diverse set of contextualizations of one and the same substantive concept of critical thinking. If we truly understand critical thinking, for example, we should be able to explain its implications:

• for analyzing and assessing reasoning
• for identifying strengths and weaknesses in thinking
• for identifying obstacles to rational thought
• for dealing with egocentrism and sociocentrism
• for developing strategies that enable one to apply critical thinking to everyday life
• for understanding the stages of one’s development as a thinker
• for understanding the foundations of ethical reasoning
• for detecting bias and propaganda in the national and international news
• for conceptualizing the human mind as an instrument of intellectual work
• for active and cooperative learning
• for the art of asking essential questions
• for scientific thinking
• for close reading and substantive writing
• for grasping the logic of a discipline.

Each contextualization in this list is developed in one or more of the guides in the series. Together they suggest the robustness of a substantive concept of critical thinking. What is Critical Thinking (Stripped to its Essentials)?

The idea of critical thinking, stripped to its essentials, can be expressed in a number of ways. Here’s one:

Critical thinking is the art of thinking about thinking with a view to improving it. Critical thinkers seek to improve thinking, in three interrelated phases. They analyze thinking. They assess thinking. And they up-grade thinking (as a result). Creative thinking is the work of the third phase, that of replacing weak thinking with strong thinking, or strong thinking with stronger thinking. Creative thinking is a natural by-product of critical thinking, precisely because analyzing and assessing thinking enables one to raise it to a higher level. New and better thinking is the by-product of healthy critical thought.

A person is a critical thinker to the extent that he or she regularly improves thinking by studying and “critiquing” it. Critical thinkers carefully study the way humans ground, develop, and apply thought — to see how thinking can be improved.

The basic idea is simple: “Study thinking for strengths and weaknesses. Then make improvements by building on its strengths and targeting its weaknesses.”

    A critical thinker does not say:

“My thinking is just fine. If everyone thought like me, this would be a pretty good world.”

    A critical thinker says:

“My thinking, as that of everyone else, can always be improved. Self-deception and folly exist at every level of human life. It is foolish ever to take thinking for granted. To think well, we must regularly analyze, assess, and reconstruct thinking — ever mindful as to how we can improve it.”

Part Two: A Substantive Concept of Critical Thinking Reveals Common Denominators in all Academic Work

Substantive Critical Thinking Can be Cultivated in Every Academic Setting

By focusing on the rational capacities of students’ minds, by designing instruction so students explicitly grasp the sense, the logicalness, of what they learn, we can make all learning easier for them. Substantive learning multiplies comprehension and insight; lower order rote memorization multiplies misunderstanding and confusion. Though very little present instruction deliberately aims at lower order learning, most results in it. “Good” students have developed techniques for short term rote memorization; “poor” students have none. But few know what it is to think analytically through the content of a subject; few use critical thinking as a tool for acquiring knowledge.(see Nosich)

We often talk of knowledge as though it could be divorced from thinking, as though it could be gathered up by one person and given to another in the form of a collection of sentences to remember. When we talk in this way we forget that knowledge, by its very nature, depends on thought. Knowledge is produced by thought, analyzed by thought, comprehended by thought, organized, evaluated, maintained, and transformed by thought. Knowledge exists, properly speaking, only in minds that have comprehended it and constructed it through thought. And when we say thought we mean critical thought. Knowledge must be distinguished from the memorization of true statements. Students can easily blindly memorize what they do not understand. A book contains knowledge only in a derivative sense, only because minds can thoughtfully read it and, through this analytic process, gain knowledge. We forget this when we design instruction as though recall were equivalent to knowledge.

Every discipline — mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, geography, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, and so on — is a mode of thinking. Every discipline can be understood only through thinking. We know mathematics, not when we can recite mathematical formulas, but when we can think mathematically. We know science, not when we can recall sentences from our science textbooks, but when we can think scientifically. We understand sociology only when we can think sociologically, history only when we can think historically, and philosophy only when we can think philosophically. When we teach so that students are not thinking their way through subjects and disciplines, students leave our courses with no more knowledge than they had when they entered them. When we sacrifice thought to gain coverage, we sacrifice knowledge at the same time.

In the typical history class, for example, students are often asked to remember facts about the past. They therefore come to think of history class as a place where you hear names and dates and places; where you try to memorize and state them on tests. They think that when they can successfully do this, they then “know history.”

Alternatively, consider history taught as a mode of thought. Viewed from the paradigm of a critical education, blindly memorized content ceases to be the focal point. Learning to think historically becomes the order of the day. Students learn historical content by thinking historically about historical questions and problems. They learn through their own thinking and classroom discussion that history is not a simple recounting of past events, but also an interpretation of events selected by and written from someone’s point of view. In recognizing that each historian writes from a point of view, students begin to identify and assess points of view leading to various historical interpretations. They recognize, for example, what it is to interpret the American Revolution from a British as well as a colonial perspective. They role-play different historical perspectives and master content through in-depth historical thought. They relate the present to the past. They discuss how their own stored-up interpretations of their own lives’ events shaped their responses to the present and their plans for the future. They come to understand the daily news as a form of historical thought shaped by the profit-making motivations of news collecting agencies. They learn that historical accounts may be distorted, biased, narrow, misleading.

Every Area or Domain of Thought Must Be Thought-Through to Be Learned

The mind that thinks critically is a mind prepared to take ownership of new ideas and modes of thinking. Critical thinking is a system-opening system. It works its way into a system of thought by thinking-through:

• the purpose or goal of the system
• the kinds of questions it answers (or problems it solves)
• the manner in which it collects data and information
• the kinds of inferences it enables
• the key concepts it generates
• the underlying assumptions it rests upon
• the implications embedded in it
• the point of view or way of seeing things it makes possible.

It assesses the system for clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic, significance, and (where applicable) fairness. There is no system no subject it cannot open.

There is a Necessary Connection Between Critical Thinking and Learning

The skills in up-grading thinking are the same skills as those required in up-grading learning. The art of thinking well illuminates the art of learning well. The art of learning well illuminates the art of thinking well. Both require intellectually skilled metacognition. For example, to be a skilled thinker in the learning process requires that we regularly note the elements of our thinking/learning:

• What is my purpose?
• What question am I trying to answer?
• What data or information do I need?
• What conclusions or inferences can I make (based on this information)?
• If I come to these conclusions, what will the implications and consequences be?
• What is the key concept (theory, principle, axiom) I am working with?
• What assumptions am I making?
• What is my point of view?

There is a Necessary Connection Between Critical Thinking and Skilled Reading and Writing

The reflective mind improves its thinking by reflectively thinking about it. Likewise, it improves its reading by reflectively thinking about how it is reading. It improves its writing by analyzing and assessing each draft it creates. It moves back and forth between thinking and thinking about thinking. It moves forward a bit, then loops back upon itself to check its own operations. It checks its inferences. It makes good its ground. It rises above itself and exercises oversight on itself.

One of the most important abilities that a thinker can have is the ability to monitor and assess his or her own thinking while processing the thinking of others. In reading, the reflective mind monitors how it is reading while it is reading. The foundation for this ability is knowledge of how the mind functions when reading well. For example, if I know that what I am reading is difficult for me to understand, I intentionally slow down. I put the meaning of each passage that I read into my own words. Knowing that one can understand ideas best when they are exemplified, then, when writing, I give my readers examples of what I am saying. As a reader, I look for examples to better understand what a text is saying. Learning how to read closely and write substantively are complex critical thinking abilities. When I can read closely, I can take ownership of important ideas in a text. When I can write substantively, I am able to say something worth saying about something worth saying something about. Many students today cannot.

Critical thinking definition

Critical thinking, as described by Oxford Languages, is the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgement.

Active and skillful approach, evaluation, assessment, synthesis, and/or evaluation of information obtained from, or made by, observation, knowledge, reflection, acumen or conversation, as a guide to belief and action, requires the critical thinking process, which is why it's often used in education and academics.

Some even may view it as a backbone of modern thought.

However, it's a skill, and skills must be trained and encouraged to be used at its full potential.

People turn up to various approaches in improving their critical thinking, like:

• Developing technical and problem-solving skills
• Engaging in more active listening
• Actively questioning their assumptions and beliefs
• Seeking out more diversity of thought
• Opening up their curiosity in an intellectual way etc.

Is critical thinking useful in writing?

Critical thinking can help in planning your paper and making it more concise, but it's not obvious at first. We carefully pinpointed some the questions you should ask yourself when boosting critical thinking in writing:

• What information should be included?
• Which information resources should the author look to?
• What degree of technical knowledge should the report assume its audience has?
• What is the most effective way to show information?
• How should the report be organized?
• How should it be designed?
• What tone and level of language difficulty should the document have?

Usage of critical thinking comes down not only to the outline of your paper, it also begs the question: How can we use critical thinking solving problems in our writing's topic?

Let's say, you have a Powerpoint on how critical thinking can reduce poverty in the United States. You'll primarily have to define critical thinking for the viewers, as well as use a lot of critical thinking questions and synonyms to get them to be familiar with your methods and start the thinking process behind it.

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The news and critical thinking: Why is it important?

Every day, we’re bombarded with a huge amount of news and information from all around the world. Whether it’s through websites, social media or TV, it’s never been easier to access the news.

Think about how many bits of news you’ve seen on your social feeds today. Do you know how much of it you can really trust?

What is media literacy and why is it important?

Media literacy is the ability to spot different types of media and to understand the messages they are communicating. It involves questioning what you’re watching, listening to or reading, so that you can make better judgements about the messages you’re being presented with.

Media includes all the different ways a message is communicated – from the news we read online to the ads we see on TV. The media we consume can inform, educate, entertain or convince us. It influences the way we see and think about ourselves and the world around us.

If we have good media literacy, it can stop us from getting stressed out by the confusing or negative things we see in the media. It can also help us focus on all the useful media that helps us to learn, connect and relax.

How can I improve my media literacy?

Question the credibility of the news source.

Whether you read the news from social media or a website, it’s important to know who is publishing the content. A credible or trustworthy news provider will make sure their reporting is impartial and free of errors.

Check out a news provider’s ‘About Us’ section on their website to learn more about their mission, values and approach to reporting. For example, as a not-for-profit, The Conversation ’s mission is ‘to provide access to quality explanatory journalism’ through articles written by ‘academics and journalists working together’. Factors like these will influence the way a story is reported.

Also consider who owns the media company, and if that is impacting the stories being produced. In Australia many publications share a parent company, meaning they may look and feel different, but they’re bound to similar publishing guidelines and rules. Check out a high level overview of Australian media organisations here .

Find news from a variety of sources

Get a balanced picture of news stories by consuming different news sources. This will give you a range of different perspectives on an issue. Media sites are often funded by advertisers, which means their reporting is driven by clicks (how people engage with the content). This causes them to report their stories in certain ways. If a news site is funded by an organisation with a particular political view, it can lead to reporting that promotes their way of thinking.

Read a mix of local publications and international news providers such as Reuters . This will help you to develop a well-informed opinion on a story.

Think about the purpose of the article

Why was the story produced? Was it to:

inform you about something that happened (news report)?

change your mind or behaviour (opinion piece)?

sell you something and promote a brand (branded content)?

A news provider might produce many different types of articles and videos, and should label them to make their purpose clear to the reader.

When it comes to the news, start with reports that contain facts, statistics from a trustworthy source (like from the government or an academic institution) and quotes from experts. Once you have the background details on a story, you’ll be able to make your own conclusions about an opinion piece written in response to it. This is especially important because prejudice against a person or group is common in mainstream media coverage.

Spot misinformation or fake news

Although social media has helped us become better connected, it has also driven the viral spread of fake news, or ‘misinformation’. Fake news is created using false or inaccurate information, with the intention of deceiving the reader. It works by grabbing a reader’s attention with a sensational or wild claim in the hope they’ll then click through and share it.

Social media feeds are based on an algorithm or system of rules that sorts posts based on the type of content you normally interact with and how popular the content is. The more people who interact with the content, the quicker the fake news spreads and the more money the site makes from advertisers who pay to put up their ads on the site. Here are a few signs the story you’re reading could be fake news:

No evidence: It contains no evidence for its claims and is often based on one person’s side of the story.

Sensational headline and images: It uses an outrageous headline and images to lure you in (e.g. ‘Celebrity kills off dad in latest prank’). The stories may also include many bizarre claims.

Not reported anywhere else: If you can’t find the story through any other news source, it’s reasonable to question its credibility.

Contains errors: The article contains spelling and grammatical mistakes or incorrect dates.

Unusual URL: For example, the site URL ends in “.com.co” or “.lo”.

Talk to your family and friends about the news you’re reading

Discussing news stories with other people will challenge and broaden your own perspective. Be open to talking with and listening to people whose views differ from yours.

If the conversation starts to become difficult or makes you feel uncomfortable, ask someone neutral to join the discussion. Or you can always stop the conversation and simply agree to disagree. There’s no point arguing with someone who doesn’t want to listen to anyone else’s perspective. Get some tips on discussing politics with family and friends .

Switch off and take a break

News has a 24-hour cycle – its output is never-ending. It can therefore be overwhelming and exhausting, especially as some media outlets tend to report mostly negative stories (because they get an emotional reaction). Get some tips on coping with disturbing videos and images here .

Turn off the news and do something you enjoy to clear your mind . Challenge yourself to a tech-free hour and spend it going for a walk or reading a book. You could do something that will refresh your mind and body, like shooting some hoops or dancing to your favourite music.

Whatever you decide to do, remember that it’s important to take a break from the news every once in a while. Taking time out helps you to think critically about and not be overwhelmed by the news. It’ll also help you with all the other tips in this article!

What can I do now?

Learn how to spot fake news by playing Bad News Game , a quick online game where you try to build a fake news empire.

Watch the CrashCourse series on media literacy for a deeper dive into the topic.

Get some tips on dealing with bad world news.