Social Science Bites

Tom Chatfield on Critical Thinking and Bias Social Science Bites
LISTEN TO TOM CHATFIELD NOW!

Tom Chatfield on Critical Thinking and Bias

October 2, 2017 9425
Tom Chatfield
LISTEN TO TOM CHATFIELD NOW!

Philosopher Tom Chatfield’s media presence – which is substantial – is often directly linked to his writings on technology. But his new book is on critical thinking, and while that involves humanity’s oldest computer, the brain, Chatfield explains in this Social Science Bites podcast that new digital realities interact with old human biases.

As Chatfield tells interviewer Dave Edmonds, while he defines bias as “an inaccurate account of the way things actually are,” this like confirmation, affect and recency bias aren’t automatically toxic to critical thinking.

A basic problem is the use of heuristics, which are generally necessary and definitely useful (“sparing you the burden of endless research”), can paper over the need to leave our perceptions open to refutation and challenge. “Letting our emotional reaction double as truth, and be substituted for what we think of as truth,” is the problem, and not the mere existence of mental shortcuts.

That tolerance of heuristics is baked into his definition of critical thinking. “What I mean by critical thinking,” he explains, “is our attempts to be more reasonable about the world. And so this tends to involve coming up with reasoned arguments that support conclusions, reasoned explanations that seek to explain why things are the way they are, and perhaps most importantly, doing all this as part of a reasonable critically engaged discourse, where you’re listening to other people, you’re prepared to change your mind.”

Yes, he adds, critical thinking includes the traditional tentpoles of deductive and inductive reasoning, but also something else. “More and more we also need to roll into this the scientific and empirical method of seeking explanations, forming hypotheses, testing theories and – and this is the additional bit for me – building into all this our growing knowledge about human lives, the predictable biases in the way of thinking.”

Chatfield, a former visiting associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, is currently technology and media advisor at Agathos LLP; a faculty member at London’s School of Life; and a senior expert at the Global Governance Institute. He is a regular on the BBC online and broadcast, and has written six books since 2010 exploring digital culture such as Live This Book!, How to Thrive in the Digital Age and Netymology, with a seventh – Critical Thinking: Your Guide to Effective Argument, Successful Analysis and Independent Study– being published by SAGE this month. Chatfield also plays jazz piano and by his own admission “drinks too much coffee.”

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save.

***

For a complete listing of past Social Science Bites podcasts, click HERE. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.

Welcome to the blog for the Social Science Bites podcast: a series of interviews with leading social scientists. Each episode explores an aspect of our social world. You can access all audio and the transcripts from each interview here. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @socialscibites.

View all posts by Social Science Bites

Related Articles

Alison Gopnik on Care
Social Science Bites
March 4, 2024

Alison Gopnik on Care

Read Now
Tejendra Pherali on Education and Conflict
Social Science Bites
February 1, 2024

Tejendra Pherali on Education and Conflict

Read Now
Safiya Noble on Search Engines
Social Science Bites
January 8, 2024

Safiya Noble on Search Engines

Read Now
Dimitris Xygalatas on Ritual
Social Science Bites
December 5, 2023

Dimitris Xygalatas on Ritual

Read Now
Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 5: A Social Science Bites Retrospective 

Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 5: A Social Science Bites Retrospective 

At the end of every interview that host David Edmonds conducts for the Social Science Bites podcast, he poses the same question: Whose work most influenced you? Those exchanges don’t appear in the regular podcast; we save them up and present them as quick-fire montages that in turn create a fascinating mosaic of the breadth and variety of the social and behavioral science enterprise itself. 

Read Now
Deborah Small on Charitable Giving

Deborah Small on Charitable Giving

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Deborah Small, the Adrian C. Israel Professor of Marketing at Yale University, details some of the thought processes and outcomes that research provides about charitable giving.

Read Now
Hal Hershfield on How We Perceive Our Future Selves

Hal Hershfield on How We Perceive Our Future Selves

On his institutional web homepage at the University of California-Los Angeles’s Anderson School of Management, psychologist Hal Hershfield posts one statement in big italic type: “My research asks, ‘How can we help move people from who they are now to who they’ll be in the future in a way that maximizes well-being?”

Read Now
5 1 vote
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments