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Transcript:
We quite clearly have a critical thinking problem these days. I mean, we’ve had a critical thinking problem for literally all of human history but as each year passes it becomes more and more disappointing to see people–particularly young people–rushing to embrace conspiracy theories and pseudoscience: particularly as it leads them into far right violence.
Take the recent events in the UK, for example. If you missed it, in late July someone went on a stabbing spree at a yoga and dance workshop, murdering three children and injuring eight more kids and two adults. The organizer of the event, Leanne Lucas, was one of the people injured as she helped save the lives of several of the kids.
As for the attacker, he was only 17 and so as a minor his identity wasn’t immediately revealed. That didn’t stop right wing agitators on social media from immediately blaming Muslim migrants because of course they did. It was honestly either going to be Muslim migrants or trans high schoolers, one or the other.
He was neither, of course–the attacker was a 17-year old British citizen. But despite that information eventually being released, the alt-right rioted anyway, throwing rocks, shouting racist epithets, and “pushing burning wheelie bins at police,” which…I mean, to the American ear “wheelie bins” makes that sound very funny but no it was pretty bad! They even tried to burn down a hotel where asylum seekers were staying, which is horrific.
Oh, but we did get this clip out of the whole incident, which is an instant classic.
These riots were the inevitable result of abject hatred and a complete lack of critical thinking, and that’s why I was happy to see that one immediate response on the part of UK government has been to overhaul the school curriculum in order to integrate more basic critical thinking skills. The Education Secretary told media that “she pledged to look at “embedding” critical thinking skills across lessons in many subjects, with a view to teaching children how to spot and reject extremist content.
“English classes might be used to scrutinise newspaper reports, comparing their style and language to fake news, while pupils may be taught how to identify fake news websites via their designs in computer lessons, and maths students could learn to analyse statistics in context.”
This is great news, and an idea that I’ve been pushing for several decades now. One of my old Skepchick sister sites was School of Doubt, where teachers from across many disciplines discussed ways to incorporate critical thinking into their own curriculums, whether that’s 2nd grade gym class or 10th grade music. Because the cool thing about critical thinking is that it IS relevant in pretty much every field, at pretty much every age.
Man, remember a time before three social media sites became the only sites people could visit, when someone could just set up and fully fund a popular educational blog that makes the world a better place, just for fun? Yeah. Well anyway
I know that science is considered the ideal place to learn basic rules of logic and separating fact from fiction, but personally always thought that my own critical thinking skills were best honed in English, Latin, and social studies classes, mostly thanks to the teachers I had in those classes: critically evaluating fiction to tease out various meanings, translating bawdy poetry and discovering fun new (but old) double entendres, or learning how to compare and contrast sources and put aside my own biases about what I’d previously thought I knew about history.
So yeah, I’m absolutely on board with the UK’s new curriculum and I do believe it will be a big help.
And it just so happens that a recent study from researchers in Spain supports this idea! A large-scale study and six-month follow-up of an intervention to reduce causal illusions in high school students was published this month in Royal Society Open Science, and yes, as you may be able to tell from the name of the journal, this study is available in full for free online and as with all my videos, the link is in the transcript, which is at patreon.com/rebecca and linked in the description below.
Open access is awesome, and even awesomer is that this study was pre-registered, which means the authors submitted all their plans for the study before they did it, which means they wouldn’t be able to massage the results to make sure they got something good.
This study was sort of a replication of a previous, much smaller study from 2013 that investigated whether or not a class on critical thinking can help stop adolescents from falling for “causal illusions.” That’s basically the classic problem of mistaking correlation for causation, which I’ve gone over many times on this channel. Basically, it’s assuming two events are related when they actually are not, or are not related in the way you assume. Like, the classic example of the number of pirates in the world decreasing at the same rate that global temperature has increased, which might suggest that piracy is the solution to global warming, an idea whose idea may have come, I think, thinking of how many streaming services have increased their rates and inserted ads recently.
Anyway, that previous study did find evidence that teaching adolescents about causal illusions works to protect them from falling for the fallacy, but it only included a “convenience” sample of 62 students, meaning they weren’t randomized as they were kids who had already signed up for a robotics class. The researchers also didn’t follow up to see how long the effects lasted. This new study was much more expansive: they started with about 300 students in a pilot study, and then moved on to test 1,668 students across 40 schools.
The researchers started by demonstrating to half the students how easy it is to fall for this fallacy. They had them wear special rings made of space age technology that was meant to improve them both mentally and physically. They pulled out the old Power Balance Bracelet trick, which was big in the early 2000s. They were rubbery bracelets with holographic stickers on them, and people in malls would demonstrate their power using old carny tricks that made it look like you, the mark, are much stronger when you’re wearing it. But you aren’t. It’s just a little rubbery bracelet.
So the researchers fooled the kids, and then revealed the tricks to them. They point out that some research suggests you maybe don’t need to do this step to de-bias someone against causal illusions, but they wanted to in part because it’s fun. Which I love! Because they’re totally right: this is EXACTLY the kind of mind blowing demonstration that would have captured my imagination when I was a kid, and so it’s likely that without it, fewer kids would be engaged in the rest of the lesson and fewer kids would really understand how the lesson might apply to their future selves. The researchers note that without this part, the lesson would just look like a regular science lesson, and that’s just not going to intrigue as many kids.
After this demonstration, the researchers taught the kids how proper controls would have allowed them to see that the rings really didn’t work. They got some more examples to demonstrate, like if you take a medicine and your cold goes away, how do you know it was the medicine and not just the natural cycle of the cold ending?
Meanwhile, the control half of the students just did general science learning on astronomy and nanotechnology.
Finally, all the participants were asked to play a little game to figure out if a made-up medicine was effective or not. They could choose whether or not to give the medicine to a made-up patient and observe if the patient got better. One medicine was basically a placebo, and another actually was effective.
In line with the previous research and their own hypothesis, the students who got the magic ring training (as opposed to the general science education) were FAR better able to correctly identify the placebo, while still being able to understand that the “real” medicine really worked. In other words, they were just the right amount of skeptical without tipping over into just assuming it’s all a scam.
The best part is that the researchers came back to the students in six months and found that the kids who got the training were still significantly more likely to be able to apply what they learned to new situations, though of course there was some drop off.
I love this study, and it reinforces for me the importance of our schools NOT just assuming science classes will handle basic logic and critical thinking. The ability to recognize our own biases and control for them spans all disciplines. It’s bad enough that many science classes that I took growing up were focused on rote memorization, but it gets even worse if the curriculum assumes that that’s where all critical thinking should be taught. We need to teach kids to read, write, watch, play, and think critically all the time, because if we don’t they’re just going to keep getting sucked into the pseudoscience alt-right bigot pipeline. We can put a stop to it now and I’m very glad that the UK government has gone on the record to say they’re taking action.
Now, I know I normally end with a clip of Indy but I’m sorry, I just can’t today. I have to see that nazi getting cranked in the nuts one more time. Remember kids, learn to think now or tomorrow this could be you.
