Social Science Space

We expect to see confirmation bias play an active role in the politics, where there is a satisfying emotional payoff from assuming the worst of the other side. We do not expect the same phenomenon among highly educated professionals, especially in their seemingly well researched publications. And yet …

I’ve spent my adult life in and around social science. Academically through studying psychology and linguistics (alongside philosophy), professionally through […]

The author of a new book on the response to the coronavirus tries first to understand how apparently sane people could think it made sense to implement damaging policies, and secondly asks how the public might ensure that such a disastrous episode can never happen again.

It’s tempting to blame bots and trolls for spreading misinformation. But really it’s our own fault for sharing so widely. Research has confirmed that lies spread faster than truth – mainly because lies are not bound to the same rules as truth.

Ever since the coronavirus spread across the world, suspicions have proliferated about what is really going on. Questions arose about […]

As scholars who research how to counter science misinformation and conspiracy theories, we believe there is also value in exposing the rhetorical techniques used in the viral video Plandemic. There are seven distinctive traits of conspiratorial thinking. Plandemic offers textbook examples of them all.

The answer for the kind of panicked flurry in reasoning we’re seeing during the COVID-19 pandemic may lie in a field of critical thinking called vice epistemology. This theory argues our thinking habits and intellectual character traits cause poor reasoning.

It’s also common to encounter people who are misinformed but don’t know it yet. It’s one thing to double-check your own information, but what’s the best way to talk to someone else about what they think is true – but which is not true?

Crises rarely see human decision-making operating at its best. Politicians and policymakers have to make important decisions in unfamiliar circumstances, with vast gaps in the available information, and all in the full glare of public scrutiny. The psychology of decision making doesn’t just tell us a lot about the potential pitfalls in our own thinking – it alerts us to ways in which some of the world’s governments may go astray.

The move towards including the first person perspective is becoming more acceptable in academia, notes the University of Queensland’s Peter Ellerton, who adds, there are times when invoking the first person is more meaningful and even rigorous than not.

Tom Chatfield, author of the new SAGE Publishing book Critical Thinking, and Mark Kingwell, the University of Toronto, held a lively conversation on the import of technology on how we think and act ‘critically.’ Chatfield, described as a ‘tech philosopher,’ and Kingwell, a more traditional professor of philosophy, traded perspectives, insights into the digital, and purportedly post-truth, era in this one-hour webinar.

In this collection of videos , Tom Chatfield eschews the biblical but embraces the practical as he gives specific guidance for training your brain to think critically. In a digital era delivering rivers of information awash in ‘fake news,’ the significance and sheer volume of this information make the question of how we engage with it a vital one.