New Blog Series: Making Critical Thinking Common Sense

Common sense is often, as you may have heard, often neither common not sensible. Usually that’s a dispiriting commentary drawn when someone – often someone with more exhaustive means of knowing at their fingertips — cites “common sense” as how they, essentially a priori, knew something that in retrospect is false or implausible. The term “common sense” is often dragooned into doing battle with the knowledge or the prescriptions of academia. As such, it’s often positioned as opposite – or even opposed to — social science.

Duncan Watts, a computational social scientist who eloquently outlines the intersection of social science and common sense in his 2011 book Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer: How Common Sense Fails Us, described the problem succinctly in New Scientist around the time his book landed:

Society often leans on common sense—favoring the immediate over the distant, focusing on individuals rather than their circumstances, and simplifying complex realities. These tendencies, while natural, shape our social lives in profound ways and can obscure the deeper forces at play.

But perhaps common sense gets a bad rap – Watts has described it “as the Rodney Dangerfield of epistemologies” – needlessly. Perhaps it just needs a more common injection of more sense. What if what we think of as common sense shed some of its trappings of cultural bias or heuristics lazily applied, and substituted them with critical thought, turning critical thinking into common thinking?

That is one of the hopes underpinning a new blog series here at Social Science Space. In The Critical Thinking Mindset, we’ve solicited short articles from around the academic world addressing critical thinking and examining ways to cultivate, distribute and promote critical thinking inside the academy and in society as a whole.

A worthy goal, if we do say so, but it requires an uphill journey.

This is where the “social science imagination” becomes essential: it offers a way to integrate common sense with critical thinking, helping us move beyond surface-level assumptions.

Social and behavioral science provides the tools to counterbalance these biases. Through rigorous methods, experimentation, and data, it reveals the contexts and conditions that shape human behavior—offering a more nuanced and equitable understanding of society. We believe that at its core, social science doesn’t reject common sense but reframes it, using critical thinking to interrogate what we take for granted and to uncover the structures that sustain inequality or reinforce the status quo.

And in a sort of feedback loop, albeit a positive one, critical thinking powers the social science imagination. It enables students to question assumptions, analyze evidence, and consider alternative perspectives. Teaching these skills empowers them to become not only better social scientists but also more thoughtful citizens—capable of navigating complexity with clarity and compassion.

As Eric Addae-Kyeremeh, a professor at the Open University, noted in a 2022 webinar on critical thinking in an age of misinformation, “To teach critical thinking well, one must realize they must lead by example and thinking critically as well. It also involves intellectual courage, which is more or less being willing to be challenged in terms of your own beliefs.” 

To give you the flavor of the series, let me share the prompts we gave to the authors.

• The Truth about Power: Uses historical and contemporary examples to show how concepts like economic inequality, environmental justice, and media representation shape cultural norms, and explores how critical thinking can help individuals challenge unjust power structures.
• Beyond the Surface: Examines how personal ideologies and assumptions about the “obvious” influence perceptions of reality and reinforce the status quo, while demonstrating how critical thinking can expose and disrupt these frameworks.
• In My Room: Analyzes everyday heuristics and attitudes to assess the role of critical thinking, offering practical strategies to overcome limitations or enhance benefits in personal decision-making.
• Solutions for a Complex World: Highlights areas such as climate change and misinformation where critical thinking is lacking, then applies critical thinking tools to reconstruct better policies and outcomes for society.

Please join us in the coming weeks as we lay our case for this hybrid heuristic, a chimera that we hope is anything but chimerical.