critical thinking should include biases or emotions

How Emotions Positively and Negatively Influence Critical Thinking

In the realm of decision-making and problem-solving, critical thinking stands as a cornerstone of effective reasoning and analysis. However, what often goes unnoticed is the significant impact that emotions can have on our ability to think critically. Emotions play a dual role, both positively and negatively, in influencing our cognitive processes and decision-making skills. Understanding this intricate interplay between emotions and critical thinking is crucial for navigating the complexities of everyday life. Join us as we delve into the fascinating dynamics of how emotions can both enhance and hinder our critical thinking abilities.

Understanding Critical Thinking and Emotions

Critical thinking is a cognitive process that involves analyzing, evaluating, and interpreting information in a logical and systematic manner. It is the ability to think independently, question assumptions, and make informed decisions based on evidence and reason. Critical thinking enables us to assess situations objectively, identify biases, and arrive at well-reasoned conclusions.

Emotions, on the other hand, are complex psychological and physiological responses to various stimuli. They can range from joy and excitement to anger and fear. Emotions are an inherent part of our human experience and play a significant role in shaping our perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors.

When it comes to critical thinking, emotions can have a profound impact on our cognitive processes. They can influence our attention, memory, and judgment, either enhancing or hindering our ability to think critically. By understanding the relationship between critical thinking and emotions, we can better navigate the challenges of decision-making and problem-solving.

In this section, we will explore the fundamental concepts of critical thinking and emotions. We will delve into the various components of critical thinking, such as analysis, evaluation, and interpretation, and examine how emotions intersect with these cognitive processes. By gaining a solid foundation in understanding critical thinking and emotions, we can then explore how they interact in both positive and negative ways.

The Positive Influence of Emotions on Critical Thinking

Emotions, contrary to popular belief, can have a positive impact on critical thinking. They can enhance our cognitive abilities, aid in decision making, and contribute to overall better reasoning. In this section, we will explore the ways in which positive emotions positively influence critical thinking.

Role of Positive Emotions in Enhancing Cognitive Abilities

Positive emotions, such as happiness, joy, and enthusiasm, have been found to enhance cognitive abilities related to critical thinking. Research has shown that individuals experiencing positive emotions exhibit improved attention, memory, and problem-solving skills. These emotions broaden our thought processes, allowing us to think more creatively and consider a broader range of perspectives. Positive emotions also promote cognitive flexibility, enabling us to adapt to new information and think outside the box.

How Emotions Aid in Decision Making

Emotions can play a vital role in decision making by providing valuable information and guiding our choices. Positive emotions can act as a signal of the desirability or attractiveness of a particular option, helping us make decisions that align with our values and preferences. Additionally, positive emotions can enhance our intuition, allowing us to rely on gut feelings and make quick and accurate judgments in certain situations.

Emotional Intelligence and its Impact on Critical Thinking

Emotional intelligence, which encompasses the ability to understand and manage our own emotions and those of others, is closely tied to critical thinking. Individuals with high emotional intelligence tend to have better critical thinking skills. They can effectively regulate their emotions, remain open-minded in their thinking, and consider multiple perspectives before arriving at conclusions. Emotional intelligence also enables individuals to recognize and mitigate the impact of biases and emotional reasoning on their critical thinking processes.

By recognizing and harnessing the positive influence of emotions on critical thinking, we can leverage these emotional states to improve our decision-making abilities, enhance our cognitive processes, and ultimately become more effective critical thinkers.

The Negative Influence of Emotions on Critical Thinking

While emotions can have positive effects on critical thinking, they can also exert a negative influence on our cognitive processes. In this section, we will explore how negative emotions can impair judgment, the role of emotional bias in critical thinking, and the impact of emotional stress on decision making.

How Negative Emotions Can Impair Judgment

Negative emotions, such as anger, fear, and sadness, can cloud our judgment and hinder our ability to think critically. When we are overwhelmed by negative emotions, our cognitive processes may be compromised. We may become more prone to cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias (seeking information that confirms our preexisting beliefs) or availability bias (relying on readily available information). These biases can distort our thinking and prevent us from considering alternative viewpoints or evaluating evidence objectively.

The Role of Emotional Bias in Critical Thinking

Emotional bias refers to the influence of emotions on our thought processes and decision making, often leading to irrational judgments. Our emotions can color our perceptions, skew our interpretations of information, and influence the weight we assign to different pieces of evidence. Emotional bias can manifest in various forms, such as the halo effect (attributing positive qualities to a person based on a single positive trait) or the negativity bias (giving more weight to negative experiences or information).

The Impact of Emotional Stress on Decision Making

Emotional stress can significantly impact our ability to think critically and make sound decisions. When we are under stress, our cognitive resources are depleted, making it difficult to engage in rational and logical thinking. Stress can impair our working memory, attention, and problem-solving abilities, leading to impulsive or hasty decisions. Moreover, emotional stress can amplify the influence of negative emotions, exacerbating the biases and impairments discussed earlier.

Understanding the negative influence of emotions on critical thinking is essential for mitigating their detrimental effects. By recognizing the ways in which negative emotions can impair judgment, acknowledging our emotional biases, and managing emotional stress, we can strive for more objective and rational decision making. In the following section, we will explore strategies and techniques to balance emotions and critical thinking for improved decision making.

Balancing Emotions and Critical Thinking for Better Decision Making

To optimize decision making, it is crucial to strike a balance between emotions and critical thinking. In this section, we will explore various strategies and techniques that can help manage and balance emotions to enhance our critical thinking abilities.

Emotional Management Techniques for Improved Critical Thinking

Recognizing and Acknowledging Emotions: The first step towards balancing emotions and critical thinking is to be aware of our emotional state. By recognizing and acknowledging our emotions, we can prevent them from overpowering our decision-making process.

Emotional Regulation: Developing emotional regulation skills allows us to manage our emotions effectively. Techniques such as deep breathing exercises, mindfulness, and positive self-talk can help regulate and reduce the intensity of negative emotions.

Taking Time for Reflection: Engaging in reflective practices, such as journaling or meditation, provides an opportunity to process and explore our emotions. This self-reflection enables us to gain insights into how our emotions may influence our critical thinking and decision making.

The Role of Mindfulness in Critical Thinking

Mindfulness, the practice of being fully present and aware of the present moment, can significantly contribute to balanced critical thinking. By cultivating mindfulness, we can develop greater self-awareness, reduce emotional reactivity, and improve our ability to objectively assess situations. Mindfulness also enhances our cognitive abilities, such as attention and working memory, allowing us to engage in more focused and effective critical thinking.

Training Emotional Intelligence for Better Critical Thinking

Emotional intelligence can be cultivated and developed through intentional practice. By improving our emotional intelligence, we can better understand and manage our emotions, as well as empathize with others. This heightened emotional intelligence enables us to approach critical thinking with a more balanced and unbiased perspective, making us better equipped to evaluate information, weigh evidence, and make informed decisions.

By implementing these strategies and techniques, we can create a harmonious relationship between emotions and critical thinking. Balancing our emotions allows us to harness the positive aspects of our emotional experiences while minimizing the negative influences. In the next section, we will delve into real-life case studies that highlight the interplay between emotions and critical thinking in action.

Case Studies: Emotions and Critical Thinking in Action

In this final section, we will examine real-life case studies that illustrate the interplay between emotions and critical thinking. By exploring these examples, we can gain a deeper understanding of how emotions influence our decision-making processes and critical thinking abilities.

Examples of Positive Emotional Influence on Critical Thinking

The Role of Passion in Scientific Discovery: Many groundbreaking scientific discoveries have been fueled by the passion and enthusiasm of researchers. Positive emotions, such as curiosity and excitement, can drive critical thinking, inspire innovative ideas, and lead to significant advancements in scientific knowledge.

Empathy in Negotiation: In negotiation scenarios, the ability to empathize with others' perspectives and emotions can enhance critical thinking. By understanding the underlying motivations and emotions of all parties involved, negotiators can make more informed decisions and reach mutually beneficial agreements.

Examples of Negative Emotional Influence on Critical Thinking

Anger and Biased Decision Making: Studies have shown that individuals experiencing anger are more likely to exhibit biased decision-making tendencies. Anger can lead to a narrow focus on revenge or punishment, impairing critical thinking and hindering the consideration of alternative solutions.

Fear and Risk Aversion: When individuals experience fear, they may become overly risk-averse, avoiding decisions that involve uncertainty or potential negative outcomes. This fear-driven mindset can limit critical thinking and prevent individuals from exploring innovative solutions or taking necessary risks.

By examining these case studies, we can observe the complex ways in which emotions interact with critical thinking. We see how positive emotions can fuel creativity and empathy, leading to better decision making. Conversely, negative emotions can lead to biased thinking and risk aversion, hindering critical thinking. Understanding these dynamics allows us to reflect on our own emotional responses and make intentional efforts to optimize our critical thinking abilities.

Emotions play a significant role in shaping our critical thinking processes. By harnessing the positive influence of emotions, managing negative emotional biases, and striving for a balanced approach, we can enhance our critical thinking abilities and make more informed and effective decisions in various aspects of our lives.

How Do Emotions Positively Influence Critical Thinking: Uncovering the Benefits

Key Takeaways

The role of emotions in critical thinking, understanding emotions.

Emotions are complex psychological states that influence an individual’s thoughts and behaviors. The importance of critical thinking is well-documented, yet understanding emotions serves as a foundation for recognizing their effect on cognitive functions. They are not merely reactive but can serve as a guiding force in the evaluation of information and the formulation of judgment.

Positive vs. Negative Emotions on Cognition

Emotion regulation and decision-making.

Effective emotion regulation is imperative for sound decision-making. It involves understanding emotional responses and modulating them to suit the context of the situation. Those who regulate their emotions well tend to navigate the decision-making process more adeptly, maintaining a balance between emotion and rational thought which is crucial for critical thinking. Regulation doesn’t mean suppression of emotions but rather integrating them in a way that enhances judgment and cognitive function.

Psychological Perspectives on Emotion and Reason

Cognitive processes and emotion, bias and emotional influence.

While emotions can bolster reasoning by providing nuanced viewpoints, they can also introduce biases that affect judgment. Emotional influence may lead to a skewed perception, where cognition is directed away from objective evidence towards a more subjective interpretation. Therefore, recognizing emotional biases is essential for minimizing their impact on critical thinking. Rigorous interrogation of both biases and emotional responses helps maintain clarity within the cognitive process, ensuring a more accurate and fair assessment of situational aspects.

Enhancing Critical Thinking through Positive Emotional States

Creativity and emotional states, the impact of motivation and passion.

Motivation and passion serve as powerful drivers that fuel one’s dedication and persistence when tackling complex issues. Passion invigorates a person’s resolve, leading to a heightened focus that is instrumental in decision-making processes. Indeed, individuals who are motivated by intrinsic interests are more likely to engage in and excel at critical thinking tasks.

Mindfulness and Cognitive Processes

Cognitive benefits of emotional intelligence, improving self-regulation.

Self-regulation , a core component of emotional intelligence, allows individuals to control and adjust their emotions in response to their environment. This ability is crucial when making rational decisions, as it helps to keep emotional responses in check, potentially reducing impulsivity and improving concentration. People who excel in self-regulation tend to be better at directing their focus toward goal-oriented activities, which is a fundamental aspect of critical thinking.

Empathy and Perspective-Taking

Managing emotional biases, practical applications in education and learning.

In educational settings, emotions can enrich the learning experience and enhance critical thinking when effectively integrated into teaching and assessment methods. These practical applications can shape more responsive and engaging learning environments.

Teaching Emotional Awareness

Critical writing and emotional articulation, assessment strategies and emotion.

Utilizing diverse assessment strategies that value emotional insight alongside intellectual analysis can lead to a more balanced evaluation of a student’s performance. For example, including peer assessments in debates or group assignments enables students to consider the emotional dynamics of teamwork and argumentation. It’s also instrumental in revealing assumptions that may underlie their assessments or coursework.

Integrating Emotions into Different Fields

Emotions in legal judgment and justice.

In the realm of legal judgment and justice , emotions can both aid and complicate the pursuit of justice. They may inform the nuances of jury decisions and influence how justice is perceived and administered. While traditionally, legal systems strive for impartiality, acknowledging emotions introduces a more comprehensive perspective on human behavior, potentially leading to more empathetic ruling . Legal professionals are recognizing that emotions may reveal underlying social patterns and biases that affect decisions.

The Role of Emotions in Scientific Research

Emotional influence on technology and social media, critical perspectives on emotion-driven reasoning.

In examining the impact of emotions on critical thinking, one must consider both the potential consequences of emotional reasoning and the strategies to balance emotion with logic. Emotions can shape the way individuals analyze information and make sound judgments.

Consequences of Emotional Reasoning

Achieving balance between emotion and logic, advanced psychological constructs.

The intricate relationship between emotions and critical thinking manifests through constructs such as valence, arousal, and communal impact. These frameworks shape how individuals process information and reach conclusions, especially in high-stakes environments like final exams or critical analyses. Understanding these dimensions offers a clearer perspective on the role emotions play in enhancing cognitive function.

Valence and Arousal in Critical Thinking

Information processing and emotional valence, the community and collective emotional impact.

In a community setting, collective emotions significantly affect the critical thinking process. Shared emotional experiences can contribute to a unified approach to problem-solving and decision-making. The phenomena can be analyzed through path analysis techniques that trace the flow of emotional influence within a group. These shared feelings, whether positive or negative, heighten communal bonds and can lead to more comprehensive analytical discussions in professional, academic, or social settings.

Frequently Asked Questions

What role do positive emotions play in enhancing critical thinking skills, can the presence of emotions improve the quality of our decision-making processes.

Yes, emotions carry important information that can guide decision-making. For instance, intuition—derived from emotional responses—can provide quick assessments that inform decisions, highlighting the relevance of emotions in complex cognitive processes.

How does emotional intelligence contribute to better critical thinking outcomes?

What strategies can be employed to harness emotions for more effective critical analysis, in what ways do emotions intersect with cognitive processes to influence judgments.

Emotions interact with cognitive processes by affecting attention, memory, and problem-solving. Positive emotions, for example, can facilitate creative thinking by expanding cognitive flexibility and enabling the mind to form more connections, thereby affecting critical judgments .

What are the benefits of a balanced approach between emotion and reason during critical evaluations?

A balanced approach ensures that neither emotion nor reason dominates the other; it promotes cognitive diversity, mitigates bias, and augments the quality of analysis. This harmony between emotion and reason is pivotal in achieving objective and nuanced evaluations during critical thinking tasks .

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Critical thinking is the one skillset you can't afford not to master

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What is critical thinking?

5 characteristics of critical thinking, what are critical thinking skills, and why are they important, 6 key critical thinking skills, critical thinking example in real-life, 13 ways to start thinking critically.

Whether you’re aiming to improve your performance at work or simply trying to live a more fulfilling life , you’ll need a variety of hard and soft skills to move the needle. Some skills come naturally to some people, while others need to develop them actively.

One of these skills is critical thinking. But critical thinking itself is made up of several types of skills that contribute to solving problems more effectively.

Let’s explore the different types of critical thinking skills and how you can start improving them to level up your career.

Critical thinking is the ability to analyze facts objectively and form a judgment. It is a form of emotional intelligence .

Someone with critical thinking skills can think clearly and rationally when the situation demands it. It allows them to perform problem-solving and decision-making more effectively. 

As a result, you can look further than what you see at face value. You’re able to analyze what you see from a situation and gain some insight that goes further than what’s obvious to anyone from the outside.

Critical thinking also requires being able to understand the logical connection between two or more ideas or concepts. For example, a team working on a company’s pricing strategy needs to think critically about several concepts. 

Both the marketing and sales teams must work together. They need to analyze how to maximize sales. But they need to do so while also meeting profit goals. It’s important to understand the logical connection between sales strategy and marketing logistics. It’s the only way to get a good outcome.

Critical thinking is different from creative thinking . Creative thinking is the ability to generate brand new, innovative ideas. On the other hand, critical thinking requires you to carefully and logically analyze what information is given to you. Both are important to maximize results in any given situation.

What defines critical thinking? How does it affect the decision-making process? Here are five characteristics that make up the ability to think critically.

1. Dispositions

Critical thinkers have specific traits that allow them to think the way they do. Some people are predisposed to these traits, while others need to develop them actively.

Some of these dispositions include:

• Open-mindedness
• Respecting evidence and reasoning
• Being able to consider different perspectives and points of view: in other words, having cognitive flexibility
• Not being stuck in one position
• Clarity and precision

2. Argument

Good critical thinkers need to make solid arguments. 

An argument is making a statement aided by supporting evidence. It’s important to use well thought-out arguments when you’re in a constructive conflict . When analyzing a situation critically, you’ll need to make several arguments in your own mind to come to a judgment. 

3. Reasoning

In addition to arguments, critical thinking also requires inferring conclusions. From the facts and arguments presented to you, you need to use reasoning skills to come to a logical conclusion. 

This conclusion will determine the best course of action to take.

4. Criteria

Critical thinking is sometimes a matter of discerning truth from fiction. Not all facts presented to you may have the same level of truth. Certain conditions need to be met for something to be considered believable, and a critical thinker needs to be able to understand that.

5. Metacognition

Metacognition is the ability to think about your own thinking. Critical thinkers should be able to analyze their thoughts so that they can judge whether or not they’ve thought everything through. This helps them come up with better hypotheses.

The critical thinking skills definition is: soft skills that help you in the critical thinking process. Developing these skills can improve your ability to think critically.

Critical thinking skills are considered one of many durable skills in the workplace . Many of these are soft skills that are also useful in other situations.

According to research by America Succeeds, critical thinking is in the top five most requested durable skills in job postings. Those top five durable skills get requested 2.6x more often than the top five hard skills. This goes to show that soft skills like critical thinking skills are in demand in the workplace.

Critical thinking skills are important for several reasons. These include helping you work independently and solve problems . Not all positions require ongoing critical thinking. But, those skills definitely matter to anyone who wants to uplevel their career. And even the most easygoing positions require at least some level of critical thinking skills.

For example, working as an accountant can be straightforward in most cases. But it may require critical thinking skills. For instance, what if certain expenses aren’t easily distributed in simple categories? Without critical thinking skills, an accountant will struggle to work independently and solve problems on their own.

Critical thinking abilities also matter in everyday life. Having a foundation for critical thinking can help you analyze several possible solutions for problems that pop up in the home. It can also help you:

• Analyze different viewpoints
• Come up with the best solution for complex problems
• Become a better learner

The key critical thinking skills are identifying biases, inference, research, identification, curiosity, and judging relevance.

Let’s explore these six critical thinking skills you should learn and why they’re so important to the critical thinking process.

1. Identifying biases

This critical thinking skill is necessary for metacognition, which is the fifth characteristic of critical thinking. It involves knowing when others have a cognitive bias and when you have one yourself.

Biases can influence how someone understands the facts presented to them. But when you’re aware of those biases, you can question yourself on those biases and consider other points of view.

Identifying biases is especially important for people who make hiring decisions. That’s because biases against groups of minorities can lead to inequalities in the workplace when not identified. 

For example, imagine a hiring manager comparing two resumes. Their gut feeling could guide them to discount one of the resumes due to a bias against the opposite gender. But let’s say this hiring manager realizes they have this bias. They can then question themselves on whether or not this bias is influencing their judgment. 

2. Inference

Inference is the ability to draw conclusions based on the information you have. Without inference, it can be difficult to take action once you’ve analyzed the facts presented to you. Processing information is key to coming up with a reasoned judgment.

For example, let’s go back to the accountant struggling to assign the correct category to a business expense. They can analyze other similar situations and infer the most logical category based on that information.

3. Research

Before you analyze facts and infer a conclusion, you need to find out what those facts are. Researching skills allow you to discover facts and figures to make an argument.

Not all situations will have the required information available to you. Researching skills are necessary to dig into a situation and gather the information you need to think critically.

Some situations don’t require further research. For example, a first responder who arrives on the scene of an automobile accident won’t perform further research. They’ll have to analyze what they see in front of them and decide which injuries are the most urgent to care for. 

On the other hand, someone performing a market analysis will need to research competitors and gather information before coming up with an opinion. 

4. Identification

Identification is different from inference and research. It involves being able to identify a problem but also what’s influencing that problem.

In short, identification is necessary for someone to realize that they need to think critically about something. Without proper identification skills, it will be difficult for someone to know when it’s time to analyze a situation. 

For example, let’s say you’re entering numbers in a spreadsheet. The numbers aren’t coming out as they usually do. Without identification skills, you could easily keep going without realizing there’s an issue. But when you identify what’s going on, you can see that something is broken in the spreadsheet’s formula.

Only once you identify the fact that the formula is broken can you start analyzing what’s going on to solve the issue.

5. Curiosity

Don’t be afraid to question everything and explore what you’re curious about. That’s because intellectual curiosity is a valuable skill, especially when it comes to critical thinking.

One way to practice curiosity is to adopt a beginner’s mindset . When you come into every situation with the mindset of a beginner, you’re able to keep an open mind. You’ll be able to perceive things you may not have noticed when keeping your mind closed.

6. Judging relevance

Not all information is equally pertinent. In order to make a critical judgment, it’s important to be able to judge the relevance of the information you have.

Take, for instance, basic online researching skills. You have access to a plethora of information on virtually every topic imaginable. But performing online research requires you to constantly judge the relevance of what you see. 

Without judging relevance, you’d spend too much time on details that don’t matter as much for the final desired outcome. But when you’re able to discern what’s most pertinent, you can give that information more weight as you’re thinking critically.

So what would critical thinking skills look like in a real-life situation?

Let’s imagine you’re working in software quality assurance (QA) as a team lead. But every time your team needs to enter bug regression, everyone gets bottlenecked because you must manually populate the spreadsheet used for the regression. While you do this task, your team cannot be productive without you.

This process happens once a week and easily wastes half an hour for each team member.

First, you must identify what’s going on. The team gets bottlenecked because only you, as the team lead, can access the information required to fill in the regression spreadsheet.

Next, you can research information. You can inquire to higher-ups about the reason why only you have access to this information. You can also speak to other teams about what potential solutions they’ve come up with to solve this problem.

Once you’ve done your research, it’s time to analyze the information and judge relevance. Some teams have solutions that don’t apply to you, so that information isn’t relevant anymore. 

Figure out if there are any personal biases before you analyze your information. 

For example, it’s possible that you don’t get along with one of the other team leads. As a result, you could discount the information they’ve given you. But by identifying this bias, you can look past your personal opinion of this person and see how valuable their solution is.

Based on what you’ve analyzed, it’s time to brainstorm and come up with a solution. You realize that creating a simple, automated script will save your team’s time. And it will do so without consuming too many resources from the engineering department.

Next, present your solution to your manager. Explain how you came to this conclusion. 

Now, let’s say your spreadsheet automation solution is approved. It’s important to go back and analyze what happens after implementing the solution. But only do this once the spreadsheet has been in place for long enough to gather plenty of information. 

Here’s an example. You could realize that the solution did solve the bottleneck. But, the script also slows down the spreadsheet and makes it difficult to work with. This would require you to go back to the drawing board and start the process all over again.

Want to start improving your own critical thinking skill sets? Here’s how you can improve critical thinking skills using 13 techniques:

• Play games that require critical thinking skills
• Ask more questions, even basic ones
• Question your assumptions
• Develop your technical skills so that you can identify problems more easily
• Find ways to solve more problems (at work and at home)
• Become aware of your mental processes, like the availability heuristic
• Think for yourself: don’t adopt other people’s opinions without questioning them first
• Seek out diversity of thought
• Start developing foresight
• Try active listening
• Weigh the consequences of different actions before you act
• Seek a mentor who can help you develop these skills
• Get professional coaching

How to improve your critical thinking skills 

Critical thinking skills aren’t always easy to develop. But it’s much easier to start thinking critically when you have someone to work with. Try a custom BetterUp demo to see how a coach can help you develop your critical thinking skills today.

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Maggie Wooll, MBA

Maggie Wooll is a researcher, author, and speaker focused on the evolving future of work. Formerly the lead researcher at the Deloitte Center for the Edge, she holds a Bachelor of Science in Education from Princeton University and an MBA from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. Maggie is passionate about creating better work and greater opportunities for all.

How to develop critical thinking skills

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How Emotions Can Support Critical Thinking

Please try again

Ask “what role should emotions play in critical thinking?” and you get an unsurprising response from almost everywhere: They shouldn’t. This response comes from a wide variety of sources ranging from Internet crowdsourcing favorite Yahoo Answers – “emotion severely HAMPERS the critical thinking process as it clouds our judgment to fact and reason” to the Academic Journal Teaching of Psychology – “critical thinking avoids emotions and emotional reasoning.” Recently, I have questioned this view that feelings have no place in critical thinking.

In the fall, a beginning teacher asked me why emotions didn’t belong in the critical thinking process and I couldn’t come up with an answer I actually stood behind. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I didn’t see emotions and critical thinking as two planets orbiting different suns. In fact, often critically thinking about an issue leads us to have big feelings about the issue. The reverse is true as well. Big feelings often lead us to think critically about an issue. So, feelings and thinking are very connected. This connection was on display in my classroom throughout a debate and writing assignment on Felon Disenfranchisement. Emotions played a central role in framing the debate and contributing to the students engagement with the issue.

Earlier this year, during a unit on voting, my class looked at this blog post from KQED’s The Lowdown titled States Where Felons Can’t Vote . The students quickly noticed that the rules about felon voting vary significantly from state to state. For example, Maine lets felons vote even while they are in prison while Florida denies the vote to prisoners, parolees, probationers, and ex-felons. My students asked great questions, “Can ex-felons from Arizona just move to Illinois so their right to vote will be restored?” And they gave great responses, “Well, only if you, as an ex-felon, have the money to move across the country and are willing to leave your family and community. Seems like doing too much for a chance to vote.” This discussion led into table debates on the topic “Should there be a national law banning felon disenfranchisement?”

I love this debate lesson and do it almost every year. This year I updated this lesson with my new focus on asset-based thinking strategies that I outlined in a previous post , structuring the lesson with these strategies in mind: A) supporting claims with evidence, B) considering different viewpoints and perspectives, and C) wondering and asking thoughtful questions. Interestingly, as the debate unfolded, I noticed that a completely different thinking strategy came to dominate my students approach – identifying patterns and themes. While they certainly used strategies like asking thoughtful questions and considering different viewpoints, they were most engaged in the process of unearthing key themes such as how it felt to be prohibited from voting, or how it felt to have someone who has broken the social contract vote within your community. And this strategy, this way of thinking, emerged from my students’ emotional engagement with the topic.

It took me a while to catch what they had done. The students framed a very academic debate about voting rights through the lens of teenage emotions and feelings. Specifically, the feeling of being “left out” or excluded and the feeling of being “betrayed.”

The students arguing for a felon’s right to vote articulated that denying them a vote makes the felons feel excluded from the community when they return. They are “half citizens, kept on the sidelines of the community.” They don’t really belong. The students who argued against a felon’s right to vote used “betrayal” as their central theme. The felon “violated the trust of his/her fellow citizens” when he/she broke the law. “You can’t just expect your community to trust you again and let you take part fully in the community relationship.”

And it worked. The evidence for each side wasn’t framed as a set of rational facts to help you win the debate – the more facts you stack up the better. The table discussions emerged from and were framed by emotional arguments – it’s upsetting to feel excluded or it hurts to be betrayed. One set of students focused on felons being “locked out of their own society” and how humans respond when they are “basically invisible” to their community. Another set of students focused on how when people betray and “disrespect their community and people, [they] have to pay. [They} have to pay with something big, like voting.” The students didn’t stop there. They supported these frames, based in emotional reasoning, with evidence and facts based in academic evidence. They made connections to other groups of people such as legal residents who are also treated as “half citizens” as well as made connections to American history, “whatever happened to no taxation without representation” and John Locke’s ideas of a social contract.

Age and maturity come with many benefits including perspective and the ability to manage setbacks and recognize when they are not the end of the world. However, creating this emotional distance can be a loss, too. The energy and passion and BIG FEELINGS of young people are effective and beautiful for framing issues of justice. Emotions and emotional framing can assemble and organize all the evidence in a way that makes someone care. It did for me that day. I stopped counting the facts the students used as they made their points and I pictured the humans who were living these facts.

Months later, on the final exam, I asked the students an essay question about voting in today’s society. Although the question did NOT specifically mention felon disenfranchisement, many of the students referenced this debate, they referenced the emotional frames, and they used these to answer the question thoughtfully.

Now when I teach critical thinking I try to figure out how to communicate that emotions can and do play a role in thinking while balancing that idea with the view that emotions cannot be the sole basis for critical thinking. More recently, my students and I practiced this more nuanced approach as we examined the rights students have on school campuses and talked about managing personal finances. It was refreshing to admit that feelings play a role in deciding how people will spend and budget money. It feels more honest – and more instructive – to not only acknowledge that their feelings are part of their equation as they think about these issues, but to encourage them to reflect critically on how they can engage their own emotional responses and feelings in combination with academic, evidence-based analysis. Doing so can amplify their power as critical thinkers.

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The Ultimate Guide To Critical Thinking

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Table Of Contents

The basic process of critical thinking, improving your critical thinking skills, critical thinking and social media, critical thinking and the mainstream media, critical thinking and improving mental health, critical thinking in everyday life.

Critical thinking is the foundation of rationality and independent thought.

Developing this vital skill allows a person to not only see the world through clearer eyes, but to reach reasonable conclusions and make better decisions in their life .

It is one’s ability to think objectively without the influence of one’s own biases, prejudices, personal feelings, or opinions and come to a conclusion solely on factual, objective information.

A critical thinker is someone who can draw logical connections between actions and reactions, troubleshoot and systematically solve problems, and detect common mistakes in the reasoning of arguments – including their own.

The critical thinker is a person who is more easily able to understand themselves and their motivations for feeling and believing the things that they do.

They are also willing and able to entertain and understand multiple perspectives of an argument before making their own decisions.

Many people mistake critical thinking for the collection of knowledge. A degree does not necessarily mean that the person is a good critical thinker, though many people credit college education with developing their critical thinking skills.

A critical thinker is more agile. They tend to use the knowledge they possess to identify weaknesses in their reasoning and seek out new information that will allow them to make a more informed decision.

They are typically not afraid to ask questions or change their opinions when presented with new information.

Another common misconception is that critical thinking means to be overly skeptical or critical of what other people are saying or doing. Though it can be used to tear through weak arguments or bad reasoning, it can also be used to help persuade and build in a more positive direction.

Critical thinking is a valuable tool for personal or professional success because it helps us make sounder decisions from a rational place rather than acting on how we feel.

There are those – often artists and creative types – who feel deeply that placing rules and restrictions on one’s thinking limits their ability to be creative. That isn’t necessarily so.

In fact, critical thinking pairs well with creative thinking when trying to build a large or long-term project. If it is not well ordered and organized, a project or idea can be broken to pieces from the stress when it finally reaches a real world application.

The guidelines and rules of critical thinking can serve to guide our thoughts. If we know, by virtue of the knowledge that we have, that some facet of a project won’t work out, we can deduce that we need a better solution rather than relying on what we know or seeking a shortcut.

That leads a creator down different roads that they may not have previously considered before.

People perceive and think of the world in different ways. The following steps present the basic process of critical thinking, but should really only be used as a guideline and a place to start developing or improving on those skills.

Analysis and problem solving is best done in a methodical way, so you can develop a habit to build on and hone further.

It can also help you identify any weaker points in your thinking so you can work on developing those further too.

1. Identification and clarification.

Identification and clarification of the problem or subject gives us our place to start. You can’t solve a problem or scrutinize information unless you identify what you are trying to accomplish.

Examples of identification and clarification may include:

– Is this news headline or article biased? The news and media, particularly opinion-editorials, will often be written from a perspective that is not neutral.

– Is this factoid presented in a way that is meant to evoke emotion? Advertisers and influencers may write or speak in such a way as to evoke an emotional reaction to influence the way you think about what you are viewing.

– Is this social media meme honestly representing the subject matter? Almost everything shared around on social media will have some emotional bias to it, often purposefully put there to play on fear or anger.

– Is this problem that I’m looking at the actual problem or is it something else? The problem in front of you isn’t always the actual problem. The low morale in a workplace may not be because the job is bad, but because management is bad. Things aren’t always what they seem on the surface.

2. Investigation and research.

Once you’ve identified what you’re actually looking for, it’s time to research and investigate the components of the thing that you are scrutinizing. How do you go about that?

– Identify the source. Ideally, you want to track the piece of information back to where it came from to see how it originated.

Is it just a problem that developed? Is it a piece of information that’s been carefully crafted by a think-tank or marketing firm with an agenda? Does anyone stand to gain anything by you or other people believing it?

In regard to personal interactions, it’s always worthwhile to double-check on their claims. Trust, but verify.

– Look for third-party information on the claim. Ideally, you want to look for neutral, unbiased third-party information about the claim.

Where can you find that? Articles from the Associated Press, Reuters, and the BBC are a good start. Websites that are from .gov and .edu domains are usually valid.

The blogs of attorneys and doctors can be valuable as well, because reputation is so important in their respective fields so they tend to scrutinize what represents them well.

Legitimate online journals and Google Scholar can be used to find studies for further information.

Any language that includes emotional appeals in the writing or material is not likely to be a good source.

3. Identify bias, either personal or external.

Identifying outside bias is much easier than identifying personal bias.

A person really needs to be in tune with who they are, what they believe, and why they believe it to be able to identify their own bias in their perceptions of a piece of information or a problem.

Again, we come back to emotions. How do you feel about the piece of information or problem? Does it invoke anger? Sadness? Excitement? Hopefulness? Why does it invoke those emotions? And are those emotions causing you to not see the other angles of the situation?

Emotion is a quick, easy way to tell that you may be influenced by your own beliefs rather than objective facts.

Of course, there are some things that we are so raw about that it is impossible to be completely objective, and that’s okay.

Just being aware of the bias and striving to not use it as a basis of your examination, judgment, and decision making will give you a much greater edge in your critical thinking.

4. Inference and conclusion.

Data and information does not always come with a clean, foregone conclusion attached to it. Most of the time, you will need to draw your own conclusions from the information that is available.

The more valid information you can gather before drawing your conclusion, the more likely it is that your conclusion will land in the general area of correct. Particular details may change the overall perspective of a piece of data.

As an example, let’s say a business produces 1,000 widgets in the course of a production run. You can’t infer if that is a lot of widgets or not.

Maybe they need to produce a million for their order, in which case it’s not that many widgets. Maybe they had machinery that broke down where they were only able to produce half of their widget capacity for the production run.

It may be a lot, it may not be. New factual information and details will change your perspective on the business’s widget production.

5. Determining relevance of information.

There is a lot of information out there. The internet is packed with over 1 billion websites where you can find a plethora of information on just about everything.

Too much information can be a serious problem. The internet is also polluted with a lot of biased and misinformation.

Even if your information is factually correct, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is relevant to whatever data, information, or situation you are trying to analyze. It may turn out that there are only a handful of data points that are important to the situation.

Let’s build a bit more on the widget example. Is 1,000 widgets an efficient production run for the company? The business has 30 employees. But wait, how many employees are actually responsible for producing the widgets?

What about management? Accounting? Marketing? Research and Development? It doesn’t matter if the company has 30 employees if only 5 of them are producing the necessary widgets.

The number of total employees is irrelevant information, though factually correct, while the quantity that are producing the widgets is relevant.

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1. Ask more relevant questions. Far too often we force ourselves into a narrow path of thinking based on the information that is given to us.

However, there are times when that path would be much broader if we only had a greater perspective of the overall situation.

Asking more relevant questions allows you to gather more information, discern what is important and not, and allows you to make more informed decisions.

2. Question your basic assumptions. Do you just know a certain thing to be true? What do you believe in as an adamant truth? Something you believe in wholeheartedly?

Question it. Look into the counterarguments from experts and other people about those assumptions.

Can you adequately justify what you believe past how you feel or what you believe? Can you shore up those adamant beliefs with facts and truth?

3. Identify your personal biases and prejudices. What do you hate? What upsets you? What makes you angry, sad, or afraid?

Identifying these emotional points in yourself can help you when you are confronted with those situations, because sometimes our emotions do not line up with the reality that we are perceiving. This is particularly true with opinion-editorials, social media, and the news.

4. Examine other conclusions. There are a lot of people in the world who have already blazed trails that you may be trying to walk down. You don’t need to blaze the trail again if you have a goal you are pursuing and need to find your way.

By all means, incorporate your own ideas and pick your own path, but do research about how other people accomplished similar goals.

It can provide additional inspiration thanks to an outside perspective that you may not have otherwise considered. Also, be certain to explore how they reached their ultimate conclusion and destination.

5. Understand that no one can think critically all of the time. Even the most stalwart of critical thinkers is going to have momentary lapses of judgment or understanding.

You’re not going to maintain a veneer of perfection in your critical thinking. No one does or can. It’s just impossible.

That’s why it is always a good idea to not only double check your own sources, but those of other people, even if they are someone you admire for their perspective or critical thinking skills.

Mistakes happen. Trust, but verify.

6. Don’t lose yourself in the research and thoughts of others. In doing your research, you do want to make sure that you are thinking for yourself .

If something seems off or doesn’t line up with your own experience, it’s worth making a note of it and exploring it further. You may find that you have knowledge of your own that changes context or perspective that can give you additional clarity.

Don’t get so caught up in the work that you forget about your own knowledge and experience.

7. Practice continued curiosity in more things. Curiosity is a fundamental part of critical thinking. It’s the reason we examine the ‘why’ of a bit of knowledge or experience.

Make curiosity and wonder a regular part of your existence. If something seems interesting to you, do some research on it.

Better yet, even if something doesn’t seem interesting to you, do some additional research on it. That will help you build a broad perspective and body of knowledge to draw from.

8. Never assume you’re right. In assuming that you are right about a particular thing, you miss out on the opportunity to learn something new from someone who might have a different perspective or information you have not considered.

It’s okay to be confident in what you know, but it is worthwhile to listen to additional perspectives for more facts and context that you may not possess.

People who assume they are right rarely take the time to really listen to other people, instead defaulting to what they think they know and closing themselves off.

Social media is a pervasive part of the everyday lives of many people. Nearly 3 billion people around the world are using social media as a means to connect, share information and news, and exchange ideas every day.

The problem with that is that people with similar ideas tend to flock together. The algorithms that social media websites utilize look at your interests, what you are commenting about, what you are liking and sharing, and serve you up more information about the things that you like.

That can be good in finding things that are relevant to your interest, but it can be bad if all you’re doing is shouting into an echo chamber.

You can very quickly find yourself being presented with news and information that is crafted and tailored specifically to people with your interests and perspectives.

On the one hand, it can be a good thing to be around other people with similar interests. On the other, it can reinforce negative and incorrect perceptions about the world, fanning the flames of ignorance, anxiety, fear, and anger.

Social media is a fantastic tool for keeping in touch and seeking out new information, but one must be careful to treat everything they read with skepticism.

People with an agenda may craft emotional appeals or create content that is slanted to evoke an impulsive emotional reaction out of the viewer.

Misinformation spreads like wildfire because it’s often emotional speculation, which resonates with people and causes them to hit those like and share buttons.

A good rule of thumb is to check the veracity and accuracy of any story or claim that evokes an emotional reaction out of you.

Angry? Disgusted? Scared? Research it. Someone with an agenda likely crafted it that way to capitalize on your emotions and use them against you.

The critical examination of these feelings and their sources can bring a lot more peace and calmness to your life.

The internet, blogging, and social media has forced mainstream media into a questionable place.

The internet and social media move at a tremendous pace. Old school mainstream media and news sources did not.

It used to be that there were only one or two new bulletins a day. It gave the news plenty of time to research stories, dig up the truth, eliminate fabrications or misconceptions, and present a fairly unbiased story.

Now, the mainstream media needs to compete with the instant gratification for information that the internet provides. Consumers of news information are going to go where they can access it immediately.

As a result, you have social media or comment sections on news sites blowing up about events that have happened, or that are currently in progress, before anyone has had any time to actually confirm what the truth is.

Many news organizations have also introduced entertainment factors into their shows, particularly with pundits and personality hosts who are able to generate an audience and draw a crowd.

Far too many people are equating the skewed opinions of their favorite hosts or pundits with what is factual, because they rely on emotional appeal to connect and maintain a relationship with their audience.

None of it should be taken at face value because it’s impossible to know just how truthful and honest that source of information is without taking the time to research their claims. Instead, use their information to guide your own research and reading.

A good indicator that you’re being influenced is the use of weasel words and speculative questioning. “Could this be happening…?” “What exactly is going on here…?” “This circumstance may be occurring…” “What don’t they want you to know?”

Good news reporting is direct, factual, and unemotional.

Improving one’s critical thinking can serve as an effective tool to help improve one’s emotional and mental health.

There are many mental health issues that stem from emotions that are either allowed to run uncontrolled or are running out of control on their own.

This is not to suggest that all emotions are controllable or that a person can just think themselves to mental wellness. That’s not how it usually works.

However, there are times when a person can lessen the effects of mental or emotional unwellness with the help of critical thinking.

Consider a person with anxiety. The news and social media are chock full of fearful information, often that is written or presented in such a way to capitalize on the emotion of the consumer.

That person with anxiety may make their own anxiety worse by constantly keeping themselves embroiled in the drama and half-truths that are rife throughout media sources.

There’s always something to be fearful of, because fear and insecurity keeps people tuning in for more information about things that may or may not affect them.

In a similar way, there are many people with depression who find solace in dark humor, sad music, or depression related memes and content.

The more depressing and sad things a person exposes themselves to, the more it is going to drag down their own mood and perceptions of the world, which in turn fuels and makes the depression worse.

It is well-known and accepted that social media can negatively impact mental health in particular situations.

However, it is also a way for people to solidly connect with one another that may otherwise have a hard time finding like-minded people. It’s not all negative, but it’s not all positive either.

Critical thinking is a powerful tool that can help a person greatly in their pursuit of peace, happiness, and a calm life, but it is not a natural skill.

Few people are inherently blessed with critical thinking capabilities, while others need to practice and train their mind to embrace the related concepts.

Adding it to your mental toolbox can help you avoid certain pitfalls of life and not be unnecessarily disturbed by what goes on in the world.

It doesn’t matter what kind of person you are. Critical thinking is good and beneficial for everyone.

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About The Author

Jack Nollan is a mental health writer of 10 years who pairs lived experience with evidence-based information to provide perspectives from the side of the mental health consumer. Jack has lived with Bipolar Disorder and Bipolar-depression for almost 30 years. With hands-on experience as the facilitator of a mental health support group, Jack has a firm grasp of the wide range of struggles people face when their mind is not in the healthiest of places. Jack is an activist who is passionate about helping disadvantaged people find a better path.

Balancing Emotion and Reason to Develop Critical Thinking About Popularized Neurosciences

• Open access
• Published: 07 September 2020
• Volume 29 , pages 1139–1176, ( 2020 )

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• François Lombard   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8933-0385 1 ,
• Daniel K. Schneider   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8088-885X 2 ,
• Marie Merminod   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8237-0317 3 &
• Laura Weiss   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8367-1891 3  

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Bioscientific advances raise numerous new ethical dilemmas. Neuroscience research opens possibilities of tracing and even modifying human brain processes, such as decision-making, revenge, or pain control. Social media and science popularization challenge the boundaries between truth, fiction, and deliberate misinformation, calling for critical thinking (CT). Biology teachers often feel ill-equipped to organize student debates that address sensitive issues, opinions, and emotions in classrooms. Recent brain research confirms that opinions cannot be understood as solely objective and logical and are strongly influenced by the form of empathy. Emotional empathy engages strongly with salient aspects but blinds to others’ reactions while cognitive empathy allows perspective and independent CT. In order to address the complex socioscientific issues (SSIs) that recent neuroscience raises, cognitive empathy is a significant skill rarely developed in schools. We will focus on the processes of opinion building and argue that learners first need a good understanding of methods and techniques to discuss potential uses and other people’s possible emotional reactions. Subsequently, in order to develop cognitive empathy, students are asked to describe opposed emotional reactions as dilemmas by considering alternative viewpoints and values. Using a design-based-research paradigm, we propose a new learning design method for independent critical opinion building based on the development of cognitive empathy. We discuss an example design to illustrate the generativity of the method. The collected data suggest that students developed decentering competency and scientific methods literacy. Generalizability of the design principles to enhance other CT designs is discussed.

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1 Introduction

Socioscientific issues (SSIs) raised by the rapid progress and potential applications of life sciences and technology in areas such as genetics, medicine, and neuroscience challenge students and future citizens with new moral dilemmas. For example, results from recent neuroscience research have attracted considerable attention in the media, with popularized information often claiming that neuroimaging can be used to decipher various human mental processes and possibly modify them. Insights into brain functioning seem to challenge the classical boundaries of psychology, biology, philosophy, and popularized science that students are confronted with. They raise intense and complex SSIs for which there is no large body of ethical or educational reflection (Illes and Racine 2005 ). There are serious issues and some controversy surrounding the confusion of brain activity with mental processes or states of mind (Lundegård and Hamza 2014 ) and the emotive power of brain scans; for example, Check ( 2005 ) and McCabe and Castel ( 2008 ) show that neuroimages can have much greater convincing power than the methods and the scientific data they produce a warrant. Ali et al. 2014 call this phenomenon neuroenchantment . Proper interpretation of the neuroimaging data frequently presented in popularized science is a key epistemological and ethical challenge (Illes and Racine 2005 ) that schools do not generally address, leaving future citizens unprepared to face these new issues. Students need to be better equipped with reasonable thinking for deciding what to believe or do: critical thinking (CT).

What citizens know of science is currently shaped mainly by out-of-school sources such as traditional and social media (Fenichel and Schweingruber 2010 ). Developing CT in students is an important educational goal in many curricula, e.g., the CIIP ( 2011 ) in Switzerland. However, the PISA study shows that there is room for improvement (Schleicher 2019 ). While the internet offers access to invaluable information, the propagation of “fake news” has become a worrying issue (Brossard and Scheufele 2013 ; Rider and Peters 2018 ; Vosoughi et al. 2018 ). Additionally, Bavel and Pereira ( 2018 ) argue that our increased access to information has isolated us in ideological bubbles where we mostly encounter information that reflects our own opinions and values. The overwhelming amount of information available on social media paradoxically does not help understand other opinions; rather, it hinders CT and especially perspective-taking (Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig 2012 ; Rowe et al. 2015 ; Willingham 2008 ).

Adding to these difficulties regarding CT, neuroscience research has been criticized because of distortions introduced through sensationalist popularization. We adopt a neutral stance towards results published under the label of neuroscience or presented as “brain research.” Education must navigate between naïve adhesion to anything published under the label of neuroscience or popularized as “brain research” and rejection of all neuroscience research because of these sensationalist flaws in its popularization. This study is an attempt to address this challenge and propose a new perspective for helping students develop some difficult aspects of CT that might enhance many classical learning designs. Self-centered or group-centered emotions often hinder CT (Ennis 1987 ; Facione 1990 ). Sadler and Zeidler ( 2005 ) also show that emotive informal reasoning is directed towards real people or fictitious characters. Imagining people’s emotional and moral reactions in these different situations without being overwhelmed by one’s own empathetic emotional reactions is a major difficulty in CT education. While the most basic form of empathy focuses on the emotional aspects of a situation, it blinds us to others (Bloom 2017a ) and hinders decentering. The more advanced cognitive form of empathy (Klimecki and Singer 2013 ) enables decentering and reasonable assessment of moral dilemmas. This article proposes an approach for developing CT that draws not only on rational reasoning but also on understanding others’ emotional reactions (cognitive empathy) to develop the perspective that is needed: thinking independently, challenging one’s own personal or collective interest, and overcoming egocentric values (Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig 2012 ). Consequently, developing this decentering aspect of CT in students is a central aim of this contribution. In addition, we argue that a proper understanding of methods is also necessary to discuss the potential and limits of research findings, especially in popularized neuroscience. Thus, methodological knowledge is a preliminary and necessary step towards understanding the social and human implications of such scientific results. Therefore, developing scientific methods literacy is a foundational goal of this contribution.

We will develop this new contribution to CT teaching in five steps:

In Section 2 , we will discuss theories that can guide the crafting of learning designs for developing selected CT skills and lead to an original conceptualization focused on decentering when discussing popularized neuroscience. We start by reviewing CT in education and its various definitions and discuss the challenges of its implementation and several approaches. We show through recent literature that attempting to ignore emotions while debating opinions does not reduce their effects on CT. Starting from this, we will discuss the importance of decentering from one’s own values and social belonging in CT and the essential role of empathy in this process. We develop the idea that helping students to discover and understand the scientific methods used in neuroscience research is foundational to imagining its limits and potential as well as others’ moral and emotional reactions. We will argue that focusing the discussion of the SSIs raised on empathetic discussion of these different reactions can enhance decentering skills. We finish by summarizing the design approach.

In Section 3 , we map the theory developed in Section 2 onto educational design principles. We first explain the conjecture mapping technique that we used (exemplified in Section 4 ). We then define learning goals, i.e., the expected effects (EEs), and finish by elaborating design principles in the form of educational design conjectures for decentering CT skills.

In Section 4 , we present, analyze and discuss an example learning design. Learning design as an activity can be defined as design for learning, i.e., “the act of devising new practices, plans of activity, resources and tools aimed at achieving particular educational aims in a given situation” (Mor and Craft 2012 , p. 86). In this study, the learning design is part of the outcome, i.e., a reproducible design. We start by presenting an abstract model based on Sandoval and Bell’s ( 2004 ) conjecture map , a design method developed for design-based research that allows the identification of key elements of a learning design in a way suitable for research and practice. The presented design was developed in 10 iterations over 15 years in higher secondary biology classes (equivalent to high school) in Geneva, Switzerland. We then present the design of the 2018/2019 implementation.

In Section 5 , we present some empirical results based on quali-quantitative data from student-produced artifacts from the 2018/2019 cohort. We also present findings from an end-of-semester survey.

Section 6 summarizes and discusses the main findings, discusses their implications and limitations, and outlines further perspectives.

We formulate two research questions at the end of the theory sections that we summarize as follows: (1) How can a conceptualization that focuses on decentering and methods literacy be implemented through an operational learning design and what are its main design elements? (2) Does an implementation of this learning design help students improve the selected CT skills?

2 Theoretical Framework

2.1 critical thinking in education.

In education, calls to develop critical thinking (CT) in students are frequent. This crucial skill, necessary for citizens to participate in a plural and democratic society, is often lacking among students according to PISA results (Schleicher 2019 ). Science education curricula usually include CT as a learning goal. The official curriculum for Swiss-French secondary schools (CIIP 2011 ) states that “In a society deeply modified by scientific and technological progress, it is important that every citizen masters basic skills in order to understand the consequences of choices made by the community, to take part in social debate on such subjects and to grasp the main issues. In the ever-faster evolution of the world, it is necessary to develop in students a conceptual, coherent, logical and structured thinking, with a flexible mind and a capacity to deliver adequate productions and act according to reasoned choices” (our translation) but then focuses on rational thinking: “The purpose of science is to establish a principle of rationality for the confrontation of ideas and theories with the facts observed in the learner’s world” (CIIP 2011 , our translation). Official educational guidelines often focus on the reason-based aspect of CT, but the emotional aspects of CT are also recognized in some official educational programs. For example, the CIIP ( 2011 ) mentions the learning goal “reflexive approach and critical thinking,” which consists in the “ability to develop a reflexive approach and critical stance to put into perspective facts and information, as well as one’s own actions…” The descriptors include “evaluating the shares of reason and affectivity in one’s approach; verifying the accuracy of the facts and putting them into perspective” (our translation).

One of the most widely cited definitions of CT, by Robert Ennis, introduces the concept as “reasonable reflective thinking, that is focused on deciding what to believe or do” (1987, p. 6). Ennis proposes a list of twelve dispositions and sixteen abilities that characterize the ideal critical thinker. This list and its items “can be considered as guidelines or goals for curriculum planning, as ‘necessary conditions’ for the exercise of critical thinking, or as a checklist for empirical research” (Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig 2012 , p. 1002). Facione ( 1990 ), in a statement of expert consensus, states, “We understand critical thinking to be purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which that judgment is based. […] The ideal critical thinker is habitually inquisitive, well-informed, trustful of reason, open-minded, flexible, fair-minded in evaluation, honest in facing personal biases, prudent in making judgments, willing to reconsider, […] It combines developing CT skills with nurturing those dispositions which consistently yield useful insights and which are the basis of a rational and democratic society” (p. 3).

In both texts, the focus is on reasonable thinking, and emotions are only referenced implicitly. For example, Facione’s definition mentions “personal biases,” and the only mention of emotion in the main text is negative: “to judge the extent to which one’s thinking is influenced by deficiencies in one’s knowledge, or by stereotypes, prejudices, emotions or any other factors which constrain one’s objectivity or rationality” (Facione 1990 , p. 10). CT seems to shun emotions. As in philosophy and argumentation, emotions are considered out of place in good reasoning (Bowell 2018 ), and no form of empathy is explicitly taken into account, except within “personal biases.”

A set of Ennis’s CT abilities are related to scientific information literacy: the ability to discuss the limits and potential of scientific information based on a good understanding of the methods and foundations of its elaboration. From a science education point of view, Hounsell and McCune ( 2002 ) propose the ability “to access and evaluate bioscience information from a variety of sources and to communicate the principles both orally and in writing [...] in a way that is well organized, topical and recognizes the limits of current hypotheses” (Hounsell and McCune 2002 , p. 7, quoting QAA 2002 ). We draw from this definition that science does not produce truths but tentative, empirically based knowledge that must be understood within the limits of the conceptual framework and hypotheses that determine the methods that produced this knowledge.

It is also important to define what CT does not mean in this context: it does not imply negative thinking or an obsessive search for faults and flaws in scientific results. CT should not be conflated with a systematic criticism of science, which in some cases has become so strong as to create defiance towards science and scientific methods. CT does not mean discussing only bad examples and exaggerated claims or inferences. Angermuller ( 2018 ) warns, “research critically interrogating truth and reality may serve propagandists of post-truth and their ideological agenda” (p. 2). Furthermore, CT should not mean observance of a teacher’s personal critical views. CT must focus on skills that allow students to reasonably evaluate knowledge on the basis of available evidence and requires recognizing but decentering from personal biases and understanding scientific methods well enough to evaluate the potential and limits of research.

One classical approach in classrooms is argumentation and debating beliefs and opinions (Bowell 2018 ; Dawson and Venville 2010 ; Dawson and Carson 2018 ; Duschl and Osborne 2002 ; Jiménez-Aleixandre et al. 2000 ; Jonassen and Kim 2010 ; Legg 2018 ). Additionally, learning progressions organizing skills into different stages have been well discussed (Berland and McNeill 2010 ; Plummer and Krajcik 2010 ). Osborne ( 2010 ) writes that much is understood about how to organize groups for learning and how the norms of social interaction can be supported and taught. For example, Buchs et al. ( 2004 ) show that debate is most efficient as a learning activity when it is very specifically organized to favor epistemic rather than relational elaboration of conflict. This requires ignoring emotions (and implicitly any form of empathy) to focus on rational discussion. Constructive controversy has been demonstrated to be very efficient at identifying the best group answer on a specific question (Johnson and Johnson 2009 ), but focuses—remarkably well—on keeping the debate rational and does encourage decentering through role exchange; however, in our view, it is not specifically focused on handling the emotions and empathetic reactions that some very sensitive issues can raise, as Bowell ( 2018 ) shows.

Teachers who attempt to organize classroom debates or argumentation often encounter great difficulty in doing so (Osborne 2010 ; Simonneaux 2003 ). They often feel ill-trained and worried about handling the emotional reactions and value conflicts that arise during discussions and arguments about SSIs. Ultimately, they frequently refrain from debates (Osborne et al. 2013 ) or confine themselves to the apparently safe boundaries of rationality. How student groups can be supported to produce elaborated, critical discourse is unclear according to Osborne ( 2010 ). An unusual approach was proposed by Cook et al. ( 2017 ). They describe it well in their title: “Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: Exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence.” This immunological metaphor of exposing students to possible biases and manipulations in advance as a strategy for developing CT skills contrasts with approaches where students are protected from and cautioned against such information, which is in turn dismissed. We consider here how to face the educational challenge and address the difficult new SSIs raised by scientific advances—notably in neuroscience.

While this article is not about conceptual change, which is the subject of abundant research, including Clark and Linn ( 2013 ); diSessa ( 2002 ); Duit et al. ( 2008 ); Ohlsson ( 2013 ); Posner et al. ( 1982 ); Potvin ( 2013 ); Strike and Posner ( 1982 ); and Vosniadou ( 1994 ), it is worth noting that conceptual change also cannot be fully understood without considering the effects of beliefs—especially on some subjects such as evolution (Clément and Quessada 2013 ; Sinatra et al. 2003 ; Potvin 2013 ). Tracy Bowell ( 2018 ) insists that against deeply held beliefs, rational argument cannot suffice: “Although critical thinking pedagogy does often emphasize the need for a properly critical thinker to be willing (and able) to hold up their own beliefs to critical analysis and scrutiny, and be prepared to modify or relinquish them in the face of appropriate evidence, it has been recognized that the type of critical thinking instruction usually offered at the first-year level in universities frequently does not lead to these outcomes for learners” (p. 172).

Discussing SSIs engages opinions. Roget’s Thesaurus defines opinions as views or judgments formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge. For Astolfi ( 2008 ), opinion “is not of the same nature as knowledge. The essential question is then no longer to decide between the points of view expressed as to who is right and who is wrong. It is to access the underlying reasons that justify the points of view involved” (p. 153, our translation). Among others, Legg ( 2018 ) discusses how difficult—even for professional thinkers—forming a well-built opinion is. We will not address this thorny philosophical question here but discuss how to develop decentering skills with 18- to 19-year-old high school biology students discovering recent popularized research. The central point in this article is not about deciding which opinion is correct or socially acceptable in the specific social and cultural environment of students or even which opinion the current state of scientific knowledge supports. Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig ( 2012 ) highlight the importance of thinking not only reasonably but also independently . This text discusses putting into perspective the rational reasons with emotional and empathetic reactions that justify one’s own opinions through understanding that others might have other underlying reasons and emotional and empathetic reactions leading to different opinions, calling for decentering skills.

It would seem natural to discuss opinions. However, discussing students’ opinions in the multicultural classrooms of today could hurt personal, cultural, or religious sensitivities and can be counterproductive (Bowell 2018 ). Research has shown that many forms of debate, e.g., debate-to-win (Fisher et al. 2018 ), can unintentionally modify participants’ opinions (Simonneaux and Simonneaux 2005 ). Abundant social psychology research has shown, for example, that holding one point of view in a debate modifies the arguer’s opinion (Festinger 1957 ; Aronson et al. 2013 ). Cognitive dissonance reduction has long been identified as an obstacle to accepting new ideas (Festinger 1957 ). Indeed, debating well-established opinions with students or even inexperienced scholars can easily lead to the entrenchment of personal opinions (Bavel and Pereira 2018 ; Legg 2018 ). This raises serious ethical questions: some learning designs might influence the opinions of students or might even become manipulative, unconsciously leading students to observance of the teacher’s personal outrage or opinion. Creating fair, respectful, and productive opinion debates in the classroom setting is difficult. The emotional reactions of teachers and students can get out of hand. Biology teachers are sometimes afraid of students’ reactions when discussing socially loaded topics such as the mechanisms of evolution (Clément and Quessada 2013 ), possibly confusing the well-established explanatory power of evolutionary scientific models with beliefs and opinions students might have. In Switzerland, biology curricula require students to be able to use these scientific models to explain observed phenomena and predict, for example, the consequences for a species of variations in the environment but not to adhere to any specific belief.

For many, a focus on rational and independent thinking should restrict the role emotions play in the opinion building process. Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig ( 2012 ) mention, “Although we think that it is desirable for students (and people) to integrate care and empathy in their reasoning, we would contemplate purely or mainly emotive reasoning as less strong than rational reasoning” (p. 1011). This concern about the threat of emotion-only reasoning could be understood by some readers to imply that rational thinking processes alone should guide independent opinion building to allow decentered thinking and that empathy should not be encouraged. It does not appear realistic to expect this of 19-year-old students, and we will discuss below how ignoring emotions in opinion building processes might in fact increase their influence.

Rider and Peters ( 2018 ) discuss free thinking, and Legg ( 2018 ) stresses how social media could lead users to avoid encountering any viewpoints or arguments that contradict their own, discussing how professional thinkers and writers seek better opinions by confronting others’ opinions. In her final line, she encourages readers to “[listen] well to those with contrary opinions—even those who promote them most aggressively—since, in the epistemic as opposed to the political space, as ever, ‘the [only] solution to poor opinions is more opinions’” (p. 56). She suggests seeking further information before behaving as if one has certainty as a way to overcome the arrogant assumed certainty that is a dismaying feature of our current regime. We fully agree with the need to take into account differing and contrary opinions: a good capacity for decentering is indeed central to CT, but how this can be achieved is a challenge that cannot be tackled without taking into account emotions and dealing with different forms of empathy.

With young students in particular, social belonging and emotions cannot be ignored. Bowell ( 2018 ) shows in an example that “students’ deeply held beliefs […] had been formed in the environments of their families and their communities. […] By recognizing and acknowledging the emotional weight of the students’ deeply held beliefs about climate change and their suspicion toward scientists and the evidence they produce, the teacher found a way to disrupt those beliefs” (p. 183). For 19-year-old students, asking for rational debate while ignoring emotions might be quite problematic for some SSIs. Since CT can be challenged by emotionally overwhelming reactions, without developing skills to decenter students from their own emotional and empathetic responses, many educational designs based on debate might not develop their full potential.

In summary, educational strategies for rational debate have substantial potential to promote science and CT and are often used in schools where CT is pursued; however, it appears, as PISA results show (Schleicher 2019 ), that there is still room for improvement. New learning designs specifically aimed at balancing reason and emotional reactions may contribute to increasing CT skills. Such designs should probably include learning to deal with the different forms of empathy that will be discussed below and could be implemented before setting up debates or possibly even before students develop their own opinions about the new SSIs raised by the abundance of neuroscience research.

2.2 Emotions and Decentering in Critical Thinking

Recent research adds evidence to what psychologists and some philosophers have long argued, namely, that opinion building and moral decisions cannot be understood solely as cold, objective, and logical (Young and Koenigs 2007 ; Decety and Cowell 2014 ; Narvaez and Vaydich 2008 ; Goldstein 2018 ) and that rational-only approaches cannot suffice to guide educational interventions on SSIs (Bowell, 2018 ). According to Sander and Scherer ( 2009 , pp. 189–195), emotion is a process that is fast, focused on a specific event, and triggers an emotional response . It involves 5 components: expression (facial, vocal or postural), motivation (orientation and tendency for action), bodily reaction (physical manifestations that accompany or precede the emotion), feeling (how the emotion is consciously experienced), and cognitive evaluation (interpretations that make sense of emotions and induce them). These interpretations differ across people, moments, individual memories, values, and social belongings, implying complex relationships among emotions, values, and “reason” and indicating how much emotional responses to the same situations can vary according to personal, cultural, and social characteristics. Emotions affect attention to and the salience of specific aspects of a situation (Sander and Scherer 2009 ) and can lead to focusing only on some aspects of the triggering situation and ignoring others. For example, negative emotions narrow the attentional focus and one’s ability to take others’ emotions, such as pain, into account (Qiao-Tasserit et al. 2018 ). Positive emotions (Fredrickson 2004 ; Rowe et al. 2007 ) can broaden people’s attention and thinking, but negative emotions tend to reduce judgment errors and result in more effective interpersonal strategies (Forgas 2013 ; Gruber et al. 2011 ).

The role played by emotions in opinion building has often been considered detrimental (Facione 1990 ; Ennis 1987 ). However, Tracy Bowell ( 2018 ) argues for “ways in which emotion and reason work together to form, scrutinise and revise deeply held beliefs” (p.170). Sadler and Zeidler ( 2005 ) insist on “the pervasive influence emotions have on how students frame and respond to ethical issues” (p. 115), and it appears there is an agreement that opinion building cannot be understood as only objective and logical. Adding empirical evidence to Sadler and Zeidler ( 2005 ) in a way, Young and Koenigs ( 2007 ) use fMRI data to show that emotions not only are engaged during moral cognition but are in fact critical for human morality and opinion building. Confirming in-group biases identified by social psychologists, neuroscience research suggests that thinking about the mind of another person is done with reference to one’s own mental characteristics (Jenkins et al. 2008 ) and can therefore interfere with and thwart decentering attempts. Vollberg and Cikara ( 2018 ) showed that in-group bias can unknowingly influence emotions and opinions in favor of the priorities and interests of the group. We see this new evidence as convergent with the discussion by Sadler and Zeidler ( 2005 ) of the interactions between informal (rationalistic, emotive, and intuitive) reasoning patterns that occur when students think about SSIs.

We have seen that both Ennis ( 1987 ) and Facione ( 1990 ) support the importance of decentering from one’s own point of view, emotions, and values in order to be able to take into account other, potentially conflicting perspectives. De Vecchi ( 2006 ) also differentiates levels of CT, with the highest level being “Debating one’s own work as well as that of others in a cooperative manner. Positively discussing objections from others and taking them into account” (p. 180, our translation). Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig ( 2012 ) emphasize thinking independently, challenging one’s own personal or collective interests and overcoming egocentric values. Piaget ( 1950 ) used the term décentration (often translated as decentering ) to describe the progressive ability of a child to move from his or her “necessarily deforming and egocentric viewpoint” to a more objective elaboration of “the real connections” between things (p. 107–108, our translation). This move implies disengaging the object from one’s immediate action to locate it in a system of relations between things corresponding to a system of operations that the subject could apply to them from all possible viewpoints. The capacity for “putting oneself in another’s shoes” and envisioning the complex potential intentions and mental states of others, also referred to as the theory of mind or cognitive empathy, begins developing in young children around the age of 2 and appears to be unique to humans and a few other animals (Call and Tomasello 2008 ; Seyfarth and Cheney 2013 ).

This particularly highlights the relevance of decentering to independent opinion building processes in our multicultural, connected world, where sensationalism, speed, and immediacy challenge one’s capacity to put into perspective one’s own opinion or emotional reactions. The SSIs raised by neuroscience research include sensitive issues such as claims in popularized media about deciphering various human mental processes (e.g., the placebo effect (Wager et al. 2004 ), face identification from neuron activity measurements (Chang and Tsao 2017 ), and vengeance control (Klimecki et al. 2018 ) and possibly modifying them (e.g., activating brain areas to control pain (deCharms et al. 2005 )) that could elicit strongly differing moral views across the diversity of social and religious belongings or personal values and monistic or dualistic views about the mind. Helping students to think independently from their moral perspective about such issues calls for teaching designs specially geared towards developing decentering skills, not just requiring them.

The process of forming an independent opinion about a given SSI should therefore include two dimensions: (1) awareness that one’s point of view and emotional reaction towards a situation are not necessarily the only ones; (2) the capacity to understand and take into account other possible emotional reactions than one’s own without necessarily adhering to them.

Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig ( 2012 ), as they highlight the importance of thinking not only reasonably but also independently , point out that CT should include the challenge of argument from authority (traditional authority of position (Peters 2015 )) and the capacity to criticize discourses that contribute to the reproduction of asymmetrical relations of power. They distinguish four main components of CT:

The ability “to evaluate knowledge on the basis of available evidence [...]”

The display of critical “dispositions, such as seeking reasons for one’s own or others’ claims [...]”

The “capacity of a person to develop independent opinions [...] as opposed to relying on the views of others (e.g., family, peers, teachers, media)”

“the capacity to analyze and criticize discourse that justifies inequalities and asymmetrical relations of power.” (p. 1002)

For these authors, while the first two components belong to argumentation, the other two have to do with social emancipation and citizenship. This socially decentered dimension of CT highlights the importance of the skills this project focuses on: “the competence to develop both independent opinions and the ability to reflect about the world around oneself and participate in it. It is related to the evaluation of scientific evidence [...], to the analysis of the reliability of experts, to identifying prejudices [...] and to distinguishing reports from advertising or propaganda. Thinking critically [...] could involve challenging one’s own personal or collective interest and overcoming egocentric values” (p. 1012).

We will refer to decentering as the ability to put one’s first emotional reactions in perspective and take into account different, contradictory values and emotional reactions other people (with different values, social contexts, and beliefs) might have in a given situation—real or imagined.

2.3 Empathy as a Skill for Decentering in Critical Thinking?

Singer and Klimecki ( 2014 ) write that perspective-taking ability is the foundation for understanding that people may have views that differ from our own and that moral decisions strongly imply empathic response systems. Empathy is “a psychological construct regulated by both cognitive and affective components, producing emotional understanding” (Shamay-Tsoory et al. 2009 , p. 617). Empathy is often considered a positive, benevolent emotional reaction, but some forms of empathy can hinder decentering. Bloom 2017a , b ) highlights the ambiguous role of emotional empathy in moral reasoning: he argues that empathy is fraught with biases, including biases towards attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background. Additionally, it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to others, however numerous they may be (Bloom 2017a ). He compares empathy to a searchlight: it focuses on one aspect of the situation and the emotions it causes but leaves in darkness the other emotional reactions that people with different values or in different situations might have; therefore, some forms of empathy do not facilitate perspective-taking. Klimecki and Singer ( 2013 ) distinguish two empathetic response systems. The first response type, emotional empathy, focuses the attention of subjects through the emotions the situation evokes but blinds them to other people’s reactions and leads to self-oriented behavior. A second type of response, cognitive empathy (which we consider to be similar to Sadler and Zeidler’s emotive reasoning), helps one understand the emotional reactions and perspectives of those with different values or from different cultures and is a critical decentering skill. For Shamay-Tsoory et al. ( 2009 ), emotional empathy is developed early in infants and acts as a simulation system ( I feel what you feel ) involving mainly emotion recognition and emotional contagion. Cognitive empathy develops later and relies on “more complex cognitive functions,” such as the “mentalizing” or “perspective-taking” system: the ability to understand another person’s perspective and to feel concerned for what the other feels without necessarily sharing the same feelings. The first form of empathy is problematic (Bloom 2017a ), because sharing the negative emotions of others can paradoxically lead to withdrawal from the negative experience and self-oriented behavior. Cognitive empathy allows for a more distant and balanced appraisal of a situation: it results in positive feelings of care and concern and promotes prosocial motivation. It also helps one understand the emotional reactions of others who have different values and social belongings, which is necessary for decentering in CT.

We have seen that opinion building cannot be considered a cold and rational process and that many biases prevent individuals from understanding others’ emotional reactions, which hinders independent thinking in CT. Some forms of empathy, also called perspective-taking, theory of mind, empathy, or sympathy, might mitigate this problem; therefore, we will discuss their implications for thinking about SSIs. Sadler and Zeidler ( 2005 ) show that empathy “has allowed the students to identify with the characters in the SSI scenarios and allow for multiple perspective-taking” (p. 115). Furthermore, they describe how emotive reactions can help students imagine others’ reactions and describe informal reasoning as involving empathy, a moral emotion characterized by “a sense of care toward the individuals who might be affected by the decisions made” (p. 121). This informal emotive reasoning is rational and rooted in emotion and differs from rationalistic reasoning. The authors insist that emotive patterns can be directed towards real people or fictitious characters. We assume that empathy (emotive reactions) directed at real or imagined people could be used in education to help students develop a decentered perspective. Complex decisions involving contradictory moral principles strongly imply empathy (Sadler and Zeidler 2005 ). While Sadler and Zeidler ( 2005 ) mention the importance of emotive informal thinking, this skill is not generally addressed when designing education about SSIs.

Shamay-Tsoory et al. ( 2009 ) suggest that emotional and cognitive empathy rely on “distinct neuronal substrates.” Singer and Klimecki ( 2014 ) also show that the plasticity of these systems allows cognitive empathy to be trained to some degree in a few sessions. Overall, these neuroscientific results suggest that cognitive and emotional systems are complex and concurrent and might well be separate within the brain. While measures of activity , from which empathy is inferred in ways the scientific community recognizes, cannot be considered from a philosophical point of view as proof, it is scientific evidence that is worth considering for learning design. This could imply that cognitive empathy can be activated and trained without necessarily activating emotional empathy. Educational designs that develop cognitive empathy and decentering might help students to “think independently, challenging [their] own personal or collective interest and overcoming egocentric values” while reducing the pitfalls of “emotions […] which constrain one’s objectivity or rationality” (Facione 1990 , p. 12). This is the challenge this research focuses on. Cognitive empathy, so crucial for decentering, is not generally developed in schools. Debate-based learning designs that do not distinguish between emotional and cognitive empathy might not realize their full potential because of previous emotionally biased opinions. This could explain some of the difficulties felt by many about purely or mainly emotive reasoning and the limits of intuitive reasoning (Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig 2012 ). The conceptualization we develop here suggests pursuing a new approach for developing decentering competency: developing cognitive empathy for the emotional reactions of others while refraining from emotional empathy in the process of building independent opinions.

2.4 Understanding Science Methods to Develop CT

Methods are at the core of research paradigms (Kuhn 1962 ) and determine a good part of the potential and limits of scientific research (Lilensten 2018 ). Therefore, some understanding of research techniques and methods is required to assess the scope (including the limits, implications, and potential uses) of research results (Hoskins et al. 2007 ). Facione ( 1990 ) also insists on the necessity of a proper domain-specific understanding of methods. One implication the experts draw from their analysis of CT skills is this: “While CT skills themselves transcend specific subjects or disciplines, exercising them successfully in certain contexts demands domain-specific knowledge, some of which may concern specific methods and techniques used to make reasonable judgments in those specific contexts” (p. 7).

Methods and their limits are often ignored by teachers (e.g., Waight and Abd-El-Khalick 2011 ; Kampourakis et al. 2014 ). Didactic transposition (DT) theory (Chevallard 1991 ) investigates how knowledge that teachers are required to teach is transformed during the process of selection into curricula and adaptation to teacher values and classroom requirements. The methods that produce research results are generally not thoroughly discussed with students. The large body of research on DT shows that to be easily teachable, exercisable, and assessable, classroom knowledge generally becomes definitive and is often reduced to assertive conclusions (Lombard & Weiss 2018 ).

Understanding the limits of neuroscience research results, especially neuroimaging results, is a particular challenge. A proper understanding of the methods used is needed to understand the limits of such research and develop a critical perspective to overcome neuroenchantment (Ali et al. 2014 ). There is a risk that activities might be understood as objects and essential concepts and that inferences of the engagement of a specific cognitive process from brain activation observed during a task might be overinterpreted (Nenciovici et al. 2019 . While research articles are required to discuss the limits of their claims, proper interpretation of the neuroimaging data commonly found in popularized science is a critical challenge (Illes and Racine 2005 ), and students are not often presented primary literature. Rather, they encounter transposed versions where claims and simplified interpretations are typically presented as definitive without discussion of the limits that the methods imply. Indeed, there are many issues with the emotive power of brain scans; for example, Check ( 2005 ) and McCabe and Castel ( 2008 ) show that neuroimages can have much more convincing power than the methods and the scientific data they produce warrant, leaving future citizens unprepared to face new issues as they arise. We will refer to this solid understanding of the methods required to assess the limits and potential uses of research as scientific method literacy .

Since methods are generally absent or insufficiently represented in the popularized science that students are confronted with (Hoskins et al. 2007 ), this has an important implication: in order to discuss SSIs, it is necessary to refer to the original article to obtain a proper understanding of the potential uses and limits of the research. Having secondary or high school students use primary literature with some help has been shown to be possible and, in fact, beneficial for a good understanding of science (Yarden et al. 2009 ; Falk et al. 2008 ; Hoskins et al. 2007 ; Lombard 2011 ).

From this literature, we draw the need for what we call scientific methods literacy, in this context defined as the ability to understand scientific techniques and methods sufficiently to imagine potential uses and limits. This will generally imply some access to primary literature.

2.5 Educational Design for Decentering CT Skills

Let us recall that we aim to propose and discuss a new learning design to develop a selection of students’ skills for CT about SSIs in neuroscience. More precisely, we aim to foster an independent opinion building. The aims of this article are (1) to translate the new conceptualization emerging from the theoretical framework into an instructional design that develops the selected CT skills in higher secondary biology classes, (2) to describe this design, and (3) to analyze and discuss the results produced by this design in its final iterative refinement. Our literature review identified two crucial skills that learners should develop to improve their CT: (i) decentering skills: the ability to decenter from one’s first emotional reactions and take into account different, contradictory values, and emotional reactions; (ii) certain scientific methods literacy skills: specifically defined here as the ability to understand scientific techniques and methods sufficiently to imagine potential uses and limits. Not discussed in this article but also relevant are other scientific information literacy skills, i.e., the ability to select and understand scientific articles and to produce text according to typical scientific practice. Below, we shall briefly outline the overall design approach, the learning goals, and the main guiding principles that can be used to generate specific learning designs such as the one presented in Section 4 .

Learning is a process that can be guided and encouraged but not imposed. “One of the ways that teaching can take place is through shaping the landscape across which students walk. It involves the setting in place of epistemic, material and social structures that guide, but do not determine, what students do” (Goodyear 2015 , p. 34). In that view, the materials and resources presented do not automatically map to learning gains; rather, the cognitive activities learners effectively practice determine the learning. Accordingly, the epistemic, material, and social structures (practical activities and productions) must be designed to encourage these cognitive activities. Goodyear ( 2015 , p. 33) explains that “The essence of this view of teaching portrays design as having an indirect effect on student learning activity, working through the specification of worthwhile tasks (epistemic structures), the recommendation of appropriate tools, artefacts and other physical resources (structures of place), and recommendation of divisions of labor, etc. (social structures).”

Thinking of teachers as designers offers methods for dealing with complex issues, reframing problems, and working with students “to test and expand the understanding of the problem. Reframing the problem, for example by seeing the problem as a symptom of some larger problem, is a classic design move” (Goodyear 2015 , p. 35). Successive iterations of the design in this project led to the new conceptualization of CT about popularized neuroscience presented here. “Typically, design-based research imports researchers’ ideas into a specific educational setting and researchers then work in partnership with teachers (the local inhabitants) to develop, test and refine successive iterations of an intervention” (Goodyear 2015 , p. 41). Design is not a one-way process by which theory is applied to practice; Schön ( 1983 ) has shown that in the development of expertise, theory is informed by practice as much as practice is informed by theory, in a continuous process. This study is design-based research (DBR), a research paradigm that was developed as a way to carry out formative research for testing and refining educational designs based on theoretical principles derived from prior research (Barab 2006 ; Brown 1992 ; Collins et al. 2004 ; Sandoval and Bell 2004 ). In DBR, iterations of the design produce conclusions—including an enrichment of the theoretical framework and derived design rules—that lead to the optimization of the design and are fed into the next iteration. “Design-based research progresses through cycles of theoretical analysis, conjectures, design, implementation, analysis and evaluation which feed into adjusting the theory and deriving practical artefacts” (Mor and Mogilevsky 2013 , p. 3). Analyzing the data from each design cycle led to reframing the problem and clarifying and focusing the education goals, which raised new research questions that in turn led to obtaining data more relevant to these renewed questions in the next iteration.

According to Collins et al. ( 2004 ), DBR is focused on the design and assessment of critical design elements. It is particularly well suited for exploratory research on learning environments with many variables that cannot be controlled individually—which rules out experimental or pseudoexperimental paradigms. Instead, design researchers try to optimize as much of the design as possible and to observe carefully how the different design elements are operating. As a qualitative approach, DBR is well suited to the creation of new theories (Miles et al. 2014 ). This choice is also ethically justified, since this is not a short experimental intervention but a semester-long course in which tightly controlled conditions might not offer the best learning conditions: in DBR, the design is iteratively adapted and offers to students the benefit of the best available design the research can provide at any time (Brown 1992 ). Better, more relevant data from each iteration were used to extract design principles and optimize the design offered to students the following year. DBR is similar to action research (Greenwood and Levin 1998 ) in the tightly interwoven student, teacher, and researcher implication and the feeding of information back to the community. In DBR, however, the design itself is the object of research and provides valuable insight into learning processes. Compared with other research paradigms, DBR is less about comparison with other published designs than about producing better questions, developing workable designs, and proposing design rules.

From this multiyear DBR approach emerged (i) the new conceptualization on which this article is based, (ii) the identification of educational goals focused on decentering skills and scientific methods literacy, (iii) the design principles presented in Section 3 , and (iv) the methods for obtaining and discussing data relevant to these goals presented in Section 4 .

3 From Theory to Design Conjectures

The method we used to guide the design of this educational module is strongly inspired by Sandoval and Bell 2004 ’s conjecture maps . We explained this method elsewhere and how we used it to help teachers in training to create, implement, and reflect on their educational designs (Lombard, Schneider & Weiss 2018 ). Central in this approach is the role of embodied conjectures . These are “design conjectures about how to support learning in a specific context, that are themselves based on theoretical conjectures of how learning occurs in particular domains” (Sandoval and Bell 2004 , p. 215). In our model, conjectures (CJs) are implemented as design elements (DEs), which are specific items (generally activities that can be enacted) introduced into the design to produce educational effects, called expected effects (EEs), such as understanding and perspective-taking. These outcomes, being abilities or competencies (EEs here), are not directly measurable (Miles et al. 2014 ), and we therefore look for performed, observable activities that reflect them. EEs are therefore assessed through observable effects (OEs), such as student productions, observations, or other traces in which relevant indicators can be measured. The codebook used for the research is available in Appendix Table 1 . In the proof-of-concept design, a simplified version was used by the teacher for assessment; the OEs used to measure the EEs are described in Section 4.2 . The DEs describe and assess the effects of the critical design elements specifically introduced to implement the CJs. They imply that a basic workable learning design is available, e.g., analyzing articles in the category information processing models described by Joyce et al. ( 2000 ) and that teachers have the skills to implement this classical design. To summarize, conjecture maps explicitly state how conjectures (CJs), i.e., contextualized theoretical constructs, will be implemented with d esign e lements (DEs), what the e xpected educational e ffects (EEs) are, and how these can be measured with o bservable e ffects (OEs) by teachers and researchers. Researchers and teachers use the same data but analyze them differently for different purposes. Teachers use OEs to measure student progression for formative assessment (Brookhart et al. 2008 ), for diagnostic assessment (Mottier Lopez 2015 ), to inform student guidance, or for student certification. Researchers in this project used these data to assess the efficiency of the design, i.e., to discuss the relevance of the OEs as measures of the EEs and the efficiency of the DEs in producing the EEs and to possibly question the CJs.

Educational strategies aiming to develop perspective-taking should be specifically designed to help students imagine and understand emotional and moral reactions to new research that are different from their own. Based on our theoretical discussion, the precise learning goals we aim to develop are scientific methods literacy and decentering competency. To compose the conjecture map (Sandoval and Bell 2004 ), we decompose these into four operationalized key skills, the expected effects (EEs):

Scientific information literacy : the ability to find, select, and use scientific text .

EE1 : identify the typical, structural elements of a scientific article (the ones often missing in a popularized article), such as the methods and references section and communicate these elements, accurately and concisely, orally, and in writing.

EE1 is part of the design but is not analyzed in this article.

Scientific method literacy : The ability to understand how the research was carried out.

EE2 : understand the techniques and methods presented in the scientific articles in order to assess the limits of scientific claims and identify several plausible possible uses of the techniques and methods introduced in the article.

Decentering competency : The ability to take some distance from one’s own emotional reactions to moral issues and to imagine and/or take into account other possible moral principles.

EE3 : imagine different moral reactions to the possible uses of the techniques and methods presented in the article under study.

EE4 : realize that one’s own reactions are not unique and consider other moral principles to assess each potential use without expressing one’s opinion.

The main point here is helping students realize that their own opinions are influenced by an ensemble of personal values and social belongings that are not absolute and can be put into perspective in order to develop decentering skills for CT. Values can be loosely defined here as what grounds a person’s judgments about what is good or bad and desirable or undesirable.

To inform the design of a learning environment to develop these educational goals, we summarize the theory discussed into a set of CJs. In other words, the educational design process is to be guided by several design hypotheses that we call CJs (Sandoval and Bell 2004 ). Each is explained below:

CJ1: Reading and analyzing scientific articles helps students improve the structure and content of their own scientific texts. Learners have to search the primary literature for specific knowledge, such as methods, and are guided to recognize and become familiar with the structure of scientific articles (Falk et al. 2008 ; Hoskins et al. 2007 ) and to elaborate their analysis in an imposed structure. Practiced repeatedly with constructive feedback, this is expected to improve their scientific literacy (Hand and Prain 2001 ).

CJ2: Sufficient understanding of the techniques and methods is needed to imagine the potential uses and limits of the student-studied research. We have seen that methods are often ignored in science teaching. Let us consider a recent paper presenting a method for producing images of the faces seen by a subject based on measurements of the neuronal activity of 200 brain neurons (in macaques) during facial visualization (Chang and Tsao 2017 ). Potentially, images of what a macaque—and probably a person—is seeing, remembering, and imagining could be produced on a computer screen with this neuroscience technique. Potential uses of this technology that raises important SSIs could include eventually being able to identify a criminal suspect’s face by recreating an accurate image of the face through neuronal analysis of the victim’s brain (a sort of direct, brain-to-paper police sketch). A good understanding of the research methods used and their limits is needed to assess the plausibility of this potential use.

CJ3: An array of potential uses of the scientific techniques studied can set the stage for cognitive empathy. Let us recall that emotional-only empathy and biases might narrow the attentional focus and prevent students from taking into account other possible emotional reactions by people with different values, from different social groups, etc. Additionally, debating opinions can unwittingly modify students’ opinions and could trigger personal, cultural, or religious sensitivities in the multicultural classrooms of today. This leads us to restrain students from stating their opinion. To encourage decentering and cognitive empathy, the theoretical discussion presented leads us to propose discussing potential new situations in which students can imagine what different people—with different values, from different cultures, etc.—could potentially use this new technique to do. In an abstract discussion of SSIs, it might be difficult to evoke others’ emotional reactions, since cognitive empathy is a process that requires imagining people’s reactions. It follows that SSIs should be contextualized in situations that the students can relate to and in which they can imagine others and their reactions.

CJ4: Framing SSIs as evoking different emotional reactions and expressing them in terms of conflicting values without mentioning one’s own opinion can develop decentering skills. Students should be encouraged to imagine possible uses, even some that might seem unacceptable to them, in order to explore possible reactions from people with different values and from different cultures and to use cognitive empathy in order to learn how to decenter when encountering a thorny and difficult SSI. Learners are encouraged to restrain their emotional empathy but to foster cognitive empathy, which is central to decentering. As an example, neuroimagery can be used to measure pain experience (Wager et al. 2004 ). The technique (the specific use of fMRI found in the methods) has many potential uses: to compare the effectiveness of and improve pain treatment, to detect fraudulent or simulated illness for insurance purposes, even to compare the pain induced by different torture treatments, etc. These situations can help students imagine the emotional reactions of other people. Refraining from expressing personal opinions could ultimately help to put them into perspective and discover the moral reasons that might cause rejection or adoption of this particular use. These can be expressed as dilemmas.

From the operational formulation of scientific literacy and decentering competency learning goals as four key skills, expressed here as EEs, and the theoretical design constructs, expressed as CJs (CJ1–4), we formulate the following research subquestions:

RQ1: How can this conceptualization (the CJs and EEs) be implemented into an operational learning design, and what would be the main DEs? More precisely,

How can activities that develop scientific methods literacy skills (learning goal EE2) be designed?

How can activities that develop decentering abilities (learning goals EE3 and EE4) be designed?

RQ2: Does the learning design help students improve the selected CT skills? This RQ2 is also divided into two subquestions:

What evidence can be found that the design improves scientific methods literacy skills in students?

What evidence can be found that the design improves decentering abilities in students?

4 From Design to a Proof-of-Principle Implementation

Our global research approach—DBR—has already been described in Section 2.5 . Here, we describe the context and the method used to collect and analyze qualitative student data from a proof-of-principle semester course. The module was designed and implemented in a higher secondary biology class in Geneva, Switzerland, by one of the authors Footnote 1 beginning in 2003. It was conducted over a period of 15 years with a total of ten different cohorts of students and refined after each implementation. The module we discuss was first implemented in autumn 2002–2003 and improved through 10 iterations until 2018–2019. In this contribution, we present and discuss the latest version of the design.

Over the course of this study, deep societal transformations, including the emergence of social media and the political turmoil caused by fake news or “alternative facts,” resulted in a shift in the goals of the design and implementation. Additionally, theoretical input from research on science epistemology and CT led to a clearer conceptualization and a better focus of the design, which is intrinsic to the DBR paradigm. Over a decade and a half, this project moved from an initial focus on discovering recent bioscience research that would be relevant for future citizens to a second, that is, discussing the nature of science. This led us to consider scientific methods literacy, which is needed to properly understand and put into perspective research findings. Furthermore, an explicit focus on developing and strengthening CT skills emerged—at a time when awareness of CT was gaining in importance. The classes also focused more specifically on neuroscience research, as it was gaining media coverage. Students’ difficulty in formulating independent opinions about complex and new SSIs that raised emotional reactions became more apparent. This eventually led us to explore various designs that encourage learners to put into perspective their own opinions when discussing SSIs and that develop decentering skills. The theoretical input from empathy research (Singer and Klimecki 2014 ) led to a focus on cognitive empathy. Taking into account Shamay-Tsoory et al. ( 2009 ) led to the exploration of possible design elements specifically geared towards practicing cognitive empathy to take emotions into account without reinforcing emotional biases and emotional empathy. Attempts to manage this while avoiding the pitfalls of opinion debate led to the focus on identifying dilemmas in the learning design principles and the proof-of-principle design (2018/2019 implementation) presented here.

4.1 Population, Data Collection, and Analysis

The data sources are student-produced artifacts—written papers from 2 to 3 home assignments and a written exam—and responses from an individual online anonymous survey administered at the end of the semester to assess students’ perceptions of their CT skills, specifically, decentering and scientific methods literacy.

In the Geneva higher secondary curriculum, students choose at the age of 16 one optional class (OC) composed of 4 semester-long modules (2 periods weekly). Students cannot choose their OC within their major, so students in this study neither have a strong background in biology nor in science generally. This study took place in the third module (ages 18–19). Classes included 13 to 24 students. Other modules with other teachers treated human’s influence on the environment and climate change, neurobiology, and microbiology. Data on student progression were collected from the cohort (13 students) of the autumn 2018–2019 semester. Four papers were analyzed: two to three written assignments handed in during the semester (3–8 pages, graded) and the final exam, each analyzing a different recent article about neuroscience. One student did not hand in all the assignments, so her data were omitted, leaving a cohort of 12 students whose data are presented in Fig.  3 . All 13 completed the survey.

The third assignment was not mandatory for students who obtained full marks on assignments 1 and 2, so only 7 students handed in the third assignment. We analyzed the results of assignments 1 and 2 and the final exam. All 13 students gave permission for their anonymized papers to be analyzed for research purposes.

Data analysis was performed using mixed quali-quantitative methods (Miles et al. 2014 .

To answer the second research subquestion, we present and compare the students’ first paper (completed at the very beginning of the semester) with their second paper. We then compare, by the same method, paper 2 with paper 3, when available, or the final exam. The EEs were observed, coded on a 3-point scale and analyzed using five indicators of decentering and perspective-taking skills: the identification of scientific methods and techniques (EE2), the quantity of moral dilemmas presented, the diversity of values presented, the quality of moral dilemmas presented (EE3), and the student’s decentered communication (EE4). The codebook is available in Appendix Table 1 . Double coding of the first and last papers was applied until a 78% intercoder agreement was reached, and simple coding was then applied for the other papers. Size effects (Cohen’s d ) were computed between the first and last papers.

The end-of-semester survey included open questions about students’ perception of their progression (comparing their first and last assignment); their approach towards scientific articles and popularized science; what they learned about the relations of science and society, about opinion building, and about refraining from giving their opinion; what they learned as they built moral dilemmas; what they learned about using cognitive empathy to approach SSIs and about distinguishing emotional and cognitive empathy; the design itself, its structure, the resources, and what they considered efficient; and if the learning was worth the effort. Many of the questions were used to improve the design over the years (DBR); however, a selection of responses relevant to this research will be presented and discussed. Footnote 2

We shall now present and discuss the proof-of-principle learning design that was then implemented in a class.

4.2 The Proof-of-Principle Learning Design

The first research question, RQ1, is a design question. It asks how a learning design that favors the development of scientific literacy and decentering competency can be implemented. The criteria for success are whether a reusable design can be defined, implemented, and evaluated. Below, we will present the key DEs implementing our theoretical CJs that could be used to attain the learning goals (EEs). The second research question (see Section 5 ) regards evaluating the effects in an implementation.

Using the CJ mapping design method described in Section 3 , we will now present the sample learning design as a detailed conjecture map connecting the theory to DEs, learning goals, and effects (Fig.  1 ). Each CJ is connected to one or more DE that in turn leads to EEs. EEs (learning outcomes) can be shared and observed through OEs, e.g., student-produced artifacts such as texts or papers produced during assignments. The latter two can be used by teachers to support the teaching process and by researchers to evaluate the design.

Implementing the goals in a learning design. From CJs to DEs, EEs, and OEs: CJ map of the proof-of-principle design

CJ1 on scientific literacy was implemented as DE1.

DE1: Students write an individual paper according to a specific structure: an introduction; the techniques and methods used in the student-studied research; a list of their potential uses; and a table listing, for each use, the reasons why oneself or others might favor it in the form of opposing values (moral dilemmas). This DE is necessary to achieve EE1 (students identify the typical, structural elements of a scientific article, and communicate these elements). Three OEs (OE1, OE2, OE3) can be used to assess students’ scientific method literacy. In this study, OE2 and OE3 were scored between 1 (lowest) and 3 (highest) using the codebook in Appendix Table 1 . OE1 (text structure) was not evaluated.

CJ2 ( Sufficient understanding of the techniques and methods is needed to imagine the potential uses and limits of the student-studied research ) is implemented with DE2 and DE3 . First, students must learn about the method and then imagine possible uses of the research as well as different people’s emotional and moral reactions:

DE2 : Students read a popularized article, try to identify the methods, write a section in an individual paper, and refer to the original article if the information in the popularized article is not sufficient. The EEs are EE1, as above, and EE2 ( Students understand the techniques and methods presented in the scientific articles in order to imagine the potential uses and limits of scientific claims ). Students must grasp the essence of the methods to produce an explanation of the methods that can be used to imagine possible uses. Learners realize that scientific claims are limited by methods and that popularized articles generally do not clearly explain the methods or discuss their limits. OE1 (text structure and elements) and OE2 (summary of methods) are used as observables.

DE3 : Find or imagine a list of potential uses of the new methods and techniques—even some that might be offensive to oneself or to other people—and write a section in an individual paper. DE3 supports EE2 and EE3 ( Students imagine different moral reactions towards the possible uses of the techniques and methods presented in the article under study ). OE4 ( table of dilemmas ) includes several potential uses realistically linked to the methods and was scored between 1 (lowest) and 3 (highest) using the codebook in Appendix Table 1 .

Decentering competency is the perspective-taking ability to take some distance from one’s own emotional reactions to moral issues and to imagine and/or take into account other possible moral positions. It relies on two CJs: CJ3 and CJ4 . CJ3 ( an array of potential uses of the scientific techniques studied can set the scene for cognitive empathy ) is also implemented as DE3 ( imagine uses of techniques and methods ) and leads to the following expected and observable effects: EE3 (same as above), OE4 ( table of dilemmas includes a diversity of moral values ), and OE5 ( moral dilemmas involve truly opposing contradictory values ). The OEs are scored from 1 (lowest) to 3 (highest) using the codebook in Appendix Table 1 ). CJ4 focuses on decentering ( framing SSIs as evoking different emotional reactions and expressing them in terms of conflicting values without mentioning one’s own opinion can develop decentering skills ).

DE4 : Students must create a table with at least two opposing values or moral principles on each line, e.g., “improvement of well-being” vs. “natural course of illness” or “knowledge progress” vs. “religious values considering early embryos as human life.” Alternatively, students could be asked to present the conflicting emotional reactions that other people might have according to their different values and social contexts. DE4 supports EE4: students realize that their own reactions are not unique and are capable of considering other values to assess each potential use without expressing their own opinion (decentering). The related OEs are OE5 ( moral dilemmas involve truly opposing contradictory values ) and OE6 ( text uses decentered expression, no personal opinion, and balanced mention of other values) , which are scored between 1 (lowest) and 3 (highest) using the codebook in Appendix Table 1 .

4.3 Implementation of a Proof-of-Principle Learning Design

This abstract learning design was implemented in a classical information processing learning model (Joyce et al. 2000 ). The resulting learning design for the 2018/2019 class can be summarized in three phases, through which students produce (i) a description of methods (OE2), (ii) a list of potential uses (OE3), and (iii) a list of dilemmas (OE3, OE4) with opposing values (OE5) that uses decentered expression (OE6). A summary of the learning design that was implemented and studied is illustrated in Fig.  2 .

Diagram of the main learning design elements (DEs), their expected effects (EEs), and observable effects (OEs)

For each of the three assignments, students were first given a popularized article on recent neuroscience research to read and were helped in class to understand the methods by identifying them in the original article from the primary literature (the student-studied research) in journals such as Nature , Science , and PNAS (DE1, DE2). Then, they were asked to use this understanding of the methods to elaborate a list of potential uses of these methods/techniques and discuss their plausibility, afterward creating a table relating each potential use to at least one moral dilemma between opposing moral principles. They had to produce (at home) a written text guided by a teacher-imposed structure:

Introduction

Methods and techniques: identify and describe the scientific methods and techniques used to obtain the results presented.

Potential uses: identify or imagine potential uses of these techniques and methods and evaluate their plausibility.

Moral dilemma: identify the moral dilemmas resulting from each of the potential uses and formulate them in terms of dilemmas (tensions between moral principles).

Students analyzed in detail three scientific articles for the written assignments. These artifacts were assessed and marked. The articles were as follows: (1) Tourbe ( 2004 ); original article: Wager et al. ( 2004 ). (2) Servan-Schreiber ( 2007 ); original article: Singer et al. ( 2004 ). (3) Peyrières ( 2008 ); original article: McClure et al. ( 2004 ). Another five articles were discussed only in the classroom, and the final exam was the fourth artifact. The exam was based on (4) Campus ( 2018 ); original article: Klimecki et al. ( 2018 ). For this class, the moral principles included benevolence, autonomy, equality, respect for life, pursuit of knowledge, and freedom of trade. They were empirically selected for their heuristic value, as the secondary students in this biology course did not have a strong background in philosophy, and the decentering goal required awareness of moral differences but not a very fine classification. Of course, other learning designs could use a different list tailored to the background of the students and goals of the curriculum. Students were required to produce a table that linked each potential use to a pair (or more) of conflicting reactions and moral values (a moral dilemma).

Over the course of the semester, feedback and assessment—at first focused mainly on scientific methods literacy—were progressively widened in scope to include potential uses and finally perspective-taking ability. In this proof-of-principle design, these assignments were graded using the OEs described above using what amounted to a simplified version of the rubric used for this research (see Appendix Table 1 ) and returned with written formative feedback highlighting specifically which items needed to be improved. Marks were improvement-weighted: progress was encouraged by a bonus on the next assignment when the items marked as wanting were improved on. This was inspired by knowledge improvement research (Scardamalia and Bereiter 2006 ) and was introduced as a strong incentive for students to improve . Through this iterative process, students were expected to gradually improve the selected skills and the texts produced. A final exam assessed the students’ skills acquired over the whole semester.

The methods, potential uses, and opposing moral principles in the form of dilemmas were first discussed in class. The focus was on instilling a sufficient understanding of the methods to allow students to find or imagine the potential uses—what different people might want to do using the techniques and methods of the student-studied research. This was done using a structured teacher-driven interactive discussion that guided students to find the methods in the primary article (OE2) and to understand them, with assistance for translation into French when needed. A few examples will illustrate how a proper understanding of the methods and their potential uses is required to imagine other people’s reactions. Understanding the methods is also necessary to see the limits of the research under study. Students had to discuss how realistic each potential use was, either based on the final section of the original article (the perspectives) or imagined by the students. This discussion of methods and possible uses naturally brought up the issue of the limits of fMRI imaging and the risks of neuroenchantment (Ali et al. 2014 ). Since the popularized article generally ignored the methods or simplified them to the point of omitting all reference to the degree of uncertainty and the limits of the claims that define scientific knowledge, students initially believed that the research under study produced claims that were definitive and “scientifically proven.” The comparison of popularized and original research very clearly highlighted some of the popularization issues Illes and Racine ( 2005 ) raised. For example, where Wager et al. ( 2004 ) cautiously conclude, “Although the results do not provide definitive evidence for a causal role of PFC in placebo, they were predicted by and are consistent with the hypothesis that PFC activation reflects a form of externally elicited top-down control that modulates the experience of pain” (p. 1167), the popularized neuroscience article that the students started with (Tourbe 2004 ) claimed that this research “proves that placebo reduces pain” (p. 26, our translation). This definitive claim is far from the prudently worded conclusion of the original article. Only a good understanding of the methods in the original article could lead to an understanding of the specific characteristics of how science validates knowledge. Reading of methods involving many control conditions and randomization brought up discussions in which students could discover essential concepts such as ceteris paribus, dependent and independent variables, and ruling out alternative explanations. While this was not the main educational goal of this proof-of-principle design, it might have helped develop students’ perspective on the nature of scientific knowledge (NOS). In fact, the claim by the popularizing journalist that this research “proves that placebo reduces pain” is not at all related to the research question of Wager et al. ( 2004 ), who attempted to explore which of three hypothesized neural mechanisms causes the placebo effect. The difference was used in the proof-of-principle design to bring up a fundamental issue, as the journalist concludes that placebo is “not only a simple psychological effect,” implying a dualistic view, while Wager et al. clearly adopt a monistic experimental paradigm (and probably view of the mind). This brought up a discussion about both possible views—quite in line with the decentering goal of this design—and students were encouraged to understand each statement in the context of the different implicit paradigms within which scientific authors and popularizing journalist work—whatever view they personally might have.

Additionally, students’ attention was drawn to the conflict of interest statement in the article by de Charms et al. ( 2005 ), which mentions that C. de Charms “has an ownership interest in Omneuron Inc. with pending patents on rtfMRI-based training methods.” This was not apparent until students read the original article. Then, students were encouraged to draft a list of potential uses (OE3) for further discussion in the form of moral dilemmas (OE4, OE5). For example, students imagined that the methods used by Wager et al. ( 2004 ) could be used to measure pain experience, to evaluate the efficiency of different pain-reducing therapies, to track down people cheating the healthcare system by pretending to have pain, or to assess the efficiency of torture methods by the military or terrorists.

Students were encouraged to plainly state the potential uses of new bioscientific methods and refrain from personal judgment. They were reminded that this course was not about deciding which opinion is best but about being able to listen to others and take other values, beliefs, and social contexts into account when formulating one’s own independent opinion. Some of these potential uses could cause strong emotional reactions, challenging the students’ own personal or collective interests. This highlights the educational goal for overcoming egocentric values: thinking independently (Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig 2012 ). Emotional reactions were expressed by students but put into perspective as possible reactions stemming from their values, beliefs, and social and cultural belongings, thus emphasizing that others might see things otherwise. For example, when formulating dilemmas and discussing how a medical doctor might have to apply advance directives regarding end-of-life issues, one student insisted on strongly expressing her opinion that doctors must do all that they can to save the lives of patients—referring to the Hippocratic Oath. This opinion was received, and the emotional load it might carry was warmly acknowledged by the teacher. Then, in the class discussion, the fact that this was one possible reaction and that others might feel otherwise was accepted and examples were sought. The Children Act (McEwan 2014 ) was mentioned as an interesting avenue for exploring this dilemma.

The definition of opinion given by Astolfi ( 2008 ) was featured in the course description and referred to in classroom discussions. The moral dilemmas students produced while studying the Wager et al. ( 2004 ) example mentioned above—in line with the potential use “evaluate the efficiency of different pain-reducing therapies”—could involve benevolence (probable pain reduction) vs. respect for beliefs (not interfering with natural processes of health or divine intervention). Most student-studied research could lead to dilemmas such as pursuit of knowledge (better understanding of brain activities and processes) vs. loss of benevolence (money used in this research is not available elsewhere for other possible benevolent uses). The rather extreme example of assessing torture methods could lead to a dilemma of benevolence (freeing prisoners from terrorists) vs. malevolence (inflicting pain on humans).

It is worth noting in this case that though scientific literature arguing for the inefficiency of torture to obtain useful confessions (Starr 2019 ) was mentioned in this class, the teacher did not prevent such a dilemma from being posed, since some people might weigh more heavily the first arm of the dilemma than the second. This highlights how the decentering goal of this design is not an ethical discussion or rational debate to determine the best opinion but could well be used before various other CT learning activities. Having answered RQ1 by describing how we successfully implemented the general design CJs (Section 3 ) using a conjecture mapping technique (Section 4.2 ), let us now examine the empirical results to answer RQ2.

5 Results from the Proof-of-Principle Learning Design

5.1 results from student artifacts.

Does the learning design help students improve their scientific methods literacy and decentering abilities (RQ2)? As explained in Section 4.1 , we examined changes in artifacts produced by students (also called student productions or learner outputs in the literature), i.e., papers and written exams. Improvement in scientific methods literacy (EE2) was measured with OE2, i.e., identification of scientific methods and techniques in student artifacts. Decentering competency (EE3/EE4) was measured with four indicators: quantity of moral dilemmas (OE3), diversity of values (OE4), quality of moral dilemmas (OE5), and decentered communication (OE6).

The results for all the items indicate progress across the semester (Fig. 2 ). With N  = only 12, we computed the effect size (Cohen’s d between the first assignment paper and the text produced for the written exam), which measures the strength of a statistical claim, taking into account the progression (difference) as well as the uncertainty (standard deviation) in the data. For most scores, the effect size can be considered large (from d  = 1.29 to d  = 2.76), while the effect sizes for diversity of values ( d  = .38) and decentered communication ( d  = .86) qualify as good.

The scores for the identification of techniques and methods, used to measure scientific methods literacy (OE2), had improved by (+ 0.6 points) by the last iteration. Concerning the second part of RQ2—measures of decentering skills—the strongest progression (+ 1.25) was found for the quantity of moral dilemmas (OE3) proposed by the students. In most papers from the second assignment, several dilemmas in the form of “value vs. other value” were found, and the score remained generally stable in the final stage. The diversity of values proposed (OE4) moderately increased (+ 0.23), but the scores for the first paper had already achieved a high mean value (2.33); thus, there was little margin for improvement. The second-highest progression (+ 0.91) was found for the quality of moral dilemmas, which measures the ability to present dilemmas as contradicting values in a symmetrical way (OE5). Decentered communication abilities (OE6) showed little progression (+ 0.33) but the highest initial value ( M  = 2.50).

In addition, the final examination (the fourth student artifact produced) was aligned with the official curriculum.

5.2 Student Perceptions: Results from an End-of-Semester Survey

Additional insights for answering RQ2 can be drawn from a selection of responses to the end-of-semester questionnaire (2019 cohort, N  = 13, responses translated from French) concerning the students’ perceptions of their CT skills (decentering and scientific methods literacy) and, to some extent, their CT attitudes.

Overall, decentering skills (EE4) were the skills most frequently mentioned by students as acquired (21 mentions), Footnote 3 expressed in statements such as (our translation)

I am more objective

I take a step away from my own opinion

I am more open-minded towards different possible points of view, be it my opinion or not

Concerning EE3 and EE4, asking students about their perceptions of moral dilemmas elicited responses that included 7 mentions related to learning to step back and take a different look at one’s own opinion and to take more into account the point of view of others or different points of view, expressed as follows (our translation):

The discussion of the use of research through moral dilemmas helped me a lot to realize that several opinions could be considered. It is not just if an opinion can be accepted, but it all depends on the point of view

I think I have learned to explain points of view that are contrary to mine rather than "feeling" them more intuitively

…to better see the vision of others even if I do not necessarily share it, and therefore to take a step back .…

Most students (10 fully and 3 partly, N  = 13) considered that they had attained the learning objective “Being able to distinguish the issues of a scientific question in the form of moral dilemmas.”

More than half (8) of the students mentioned that emotions and empathy played a role in imagining or assessing potential situations, expressed as follows (our translation):

For me, cognitive empathy played a major role in the choice of dilemmas, because, I tried my best to put myself on each side of opinions in order to be as objective as possible, without feeling emotional empathy

My empathy probably biased my judgment of potential uses, but I don't think I let it show in my work

I think I can tell them apart. My emotional empathy is the first that arrives, and my cognitive empathy comes to take a step back before making a judgment

Concerning EE2 (scientific methods literacy), a large majority of students considered they had changed the way they formed opinions about progress in science during this module (11, N  = 13). The skills most often mentioned included learning to be wary of popularized articles (16 mentions), thinking more critically about scientific information (8), and developing the habit of referring to original scientific articles (8). Many mentioned being better able to understand and/or explain the methods and results of scientific research (7).

6 Discussion

This exploratory study develops a new conceptualization and a learning design method for developing a few specific CT skills useful for discussing SSIs raised by popularized (neuro)science. The goal of this educational research was to extract theoretical conjectures from recent research on CT education and the effects of emotions, decentering, and empathy and test their generativity in producing workable designs in which the acquisition of desired CT skills (decentering, methods literacy) can be observed through traces. In short, we presented guidelines for creating learning designs, and we tested a proof-of-principle design implemented in a class.

The results from this 2018/2019 implementation show that students were able to propose a diversity of moral principles (mostly found in the resources proposed for the course) in the first assignment—early in the semester—and their texts also show signs of moderately good decentering skills. However, the most progress seems to occur in the structuration of these values into full-fledged moral dilemmas: moral principle A vs. moral principle B. In the first paper, moral principles were often written in a disorganized way, while in paper 2, they were more frequently proposed in the form of dilemmas. We propose that this improved structuration reflects an improved ability to conceptually organize conflicting values without judgment into symmetrical pairs of opposites, which requires restraining one’s opinions and is indicative of a good decentering ability.

These results also tentatively confirm the value of iterating essentially the same activity in this design. Contrary to the advice frequently given to teachers to use varying types of tasks, repeated assignments involving the same task but different topics, guided by precise feedback as well as incentive-based grading, helped learners significantly improve the targeted high-level skills, i.e., scientific methods literacy and decentering abilities, as measured by increased OE scores on the texts produced by students (Section 5.1 ). A design based on a single assignment would probably not give students sufficient time and opportunity to learn these specific difficult skills.

The central choice to not debate opinions, with students expressly instructed to refrain from expressing their personal opinions on the SSIs under study, appears to have been perceived as effective (13 mentions in the end-of-semester survey) but was also a challenge for some of the students:

I found [not giving my opinion] difficult, as our opinion is the best, we tend to want to express it and share it. However, staying neutral and discussing all imaginable opinions of a situation is a task I [ultimately] enjoyed doing (our translation).

It would be methodologically problematic to fuse data obtained from previous cohorts in an evolving design, but we would like to mention that previous questionnaires Footnote 4 yielded similar results on these points.

Taken together, the results from the students’ artifacts and the survey tentatively suggest that engaging learners in the described learning activities produced a shift in students’ epistemology, from a naïve epistemology that knowledge is either true or false and that truths come from recognized authority (Bromme et al. 2010 ) towards a more sophisticated one. Learners developed independent opinions and moved from mostly emotionally empathetic reactions to a more decentered (cognitive) empathy when forming opinions about neuroscience SSIs. The increase in scientific methods literacy (see Fig. 3 ) and the final questionnaire responses mentioning the importance of reading original articles or understanding the methods, taken together, suggest a more critical appraisal of popularized scientific information.

Average scores ( M ) in the proof-of-principle learning design for scientific methods literacy and methods (OE2) and decentering (OE3–6). Also shown: the standard deviation and the effect size (Cohen’s d between first and last), in white on the bars

Let us recall our theoretical tenants: emotions play an important role in opinion building, particularly when contradicting moral principles are involved. We also distinguish between emotional empathy and cognitive empathy. The latter allows for a more distant and balanced appraisal of situations and can result in positive feelings of care and prosocial motivation. Overall, research shows that cognitive and emotional systems are complex and concurrent, and the possibility that emotional and cognitive empathy could be separate processes opens the important possibility that they can be trained separately.

This new conceptualization based on developing cognitive empathy and balancing emotion with reason to enhance decentering in opinion building regarding new SSIs—described in Section 2 —is the main theoretical outcome of this research. We propose that it offers a new perspective that could be used as a preliminary step to enhance many CT learning designs. The second outcome (answering RQ1) is the development of a design and analysis method based on conjecture mapping (Section 3 ) that guides the translation of theory into practical learning designs. This design method showed its effectiveness by producing, according to design-based research principles, successive workable learning designs that could be improved to develop scientific literacy and decentering competency in a typical classroom. The related empirical outcome associated with RQ2 is a proof-of-principle design in which students’ written artifacts could be analyzed. It is described in Section 4 and discussed in Section 5 . It has been iteratively implemented, analyzed, and optimized over many years.

Cognitive empathy, though crucial for decentering, is not generally developed in schools, but our results suggest it can be taught. Having to identify conflicting moral principles seems to have helped the learners realize that contradictory positions about neuroscience SSIs do exist, could be valid, and should be taken into account in their opinion building process. Traces in the assignments and exams suggest that this important step towards balancing emotion and reason in discussing neuroscience SSIs was achieved. Our results do not prove the development of important intermediates such as cognitive empathy or the control of emotional empathy, but taken together, they do suggest that the design method can produce designs that contribute to this educational goal of independent opinion building. The results tentatively confirm that addressing the emotions evoked by SSIs can be an early step towards CT, not just the ultimate level of CT (De Vecchi 2006 ) requiring a degree of emotional control rarely achieved except by expert debaters (Legg 2018 ). They offer reasonable evidence that this new conceptualization of CT—based on recent research that cognitive empathy can be trained separately—can be used to inform workable designs that produce interesting results related to the decentering and scientific literacy skills identified and selected in this study.

7 Conclusions and Discussion

Within the large array of CT designs, this new conceptualization offers a novel perspective on addressing the numerous biases and difficulties that emotions can induce. The outcomes we present could be of use (i) for researchers (new conceptualization), (ii) for educational designers (CJ mapping), and (iii) to inspire teachers and educational designers (proof-of-principle design).

Giving students a good understanding of methods (scientific methods literacy) can empower them to see through much of the hype and overinterpretation of popularized science, as exemplified in neuroenchantment. This focus on scientific methods is rare (Kampourakis et al. 2014 ) and aims to help students assess the limits and potential uses of scientific claims before addressing SSIs. It can also help students understand how knowledge is validated in scientific articles. On this solid rational basis, the approach presented here takes the unusual route of developing decentering skills for discussing SSIs by letting students imagine people and their emotional reactions in the new situations that could result from neuroscience research. By refraining from debating formed opinions , which has been shown to limit the full potential of many designs for CT education, and instead discussing diverse possible emotional reactions in the form of moral dilemmas, this design attempts to circumvent many of the problems of classroom debates and could prepare students for the reasonable reflective thinking that defines CT (Ennis 1987 ). This approach is founded on the idea that cognitive empathy can be developed without reinforcing emotional empathy. It is an attempt to help students take their own and others’ emotions into account in a reasonable way (decentering in the sense of Klimecki and Singer ( 2013 )) and reconcile emotions and reason. It could be seen as an approach for fostering emotive reasoning (Sadler and Zeidler 2005 ).

We have argued that learning to take into account different, contradictory reactions to SSIs by other people (with different values, social contexts, and beliefs) and developing cognitive empathy for the emotional reactions of other while refraining from emotional empathy can be foundational in the process of building independent opinions (Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig 2012 ) by helping students take into account and learn to manage others’ and their own emotional reactions (decentering skills). The proposed design method translates this theory into educational guidelines in the form of conjectures, design elements, expected effects, and observable effects that have been implemented and analyzed. The analysis of student artifacts about recent popularized and original neuroscience research suggests that this conceptualization focused on scientific methods literacy and cognitive empathy can be used to effectively develop decentering skills as measured by the observed effects. It does not prove that these students are better in all dimensions of CT but confirms the validity of exploring this approach.

From a research perspective, the proof-of-principle design could not be compared with designs considered standards or references, since this conceptualization breaks new research ground. We have discussed how the DBR research paradigm (e.g., Collins et al. 2004 ) differs from the experimental paradigm and argued that it is particularly relevant for exploring innovative designs addressing new educational challenges. The first student paper analyzed—at the very beginning of the semester—delivers much of the information expected from a pretest, as it tests students’ skills before the semester-long intervention. The final exam—while designed from a certificative assessment perspective—can be considered delivering some of the information of a posttest. Setting up a quasi-experimental control group design would be too difficult, since there are too many design variables to manipulate and the number of students available is insufficient. However, our results are evidence that this design is worth investigating in larger educational setups. Additionally, some results, such as the marked progression in the quantity and quality of moral dilemmas, might be explained by the fact that students did not fully understand the instructions at the beginning or took time to adjust to new expectations and therefore adjusted the content and structure of their second paper. While the analysis of student artifacts during this semester-long design indicates progress, suggesting that students developed CT skills EE1–4 with respect to recent neuroscience SSIs, we have no data about the long-term effects on independent opinion building and CT (no follow-up survey) or about the possible influence these effects might have on their future decisions. We fully agree with the need for developing dispositions towards CT (Ennis 1987 ; Facione 1990 ; Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig 2012 ). We did collect some evidence that students demonstrate selected CT skills in their papers and exams, but without data about the actual behavior of students outside of and after this course, caution is required in drawing conclusions about possible changes in terms of CT dispositions .

Another limitation that requires discussion is the fact that the teacher is also one of the researchers, a classical validity-related concern. We would like to stress that widely recognized authors such as Schön ( 1983 ) have demonstrated the richness and relevance of the “reflective practitioner” approach, particularly for education research seen as design-based (Goodyear 2015 ). DBR and action research (Greenwood and Levin 1998 ) often rely on this implication to increase the relevance of the outcomes. It is possible that this reflective subjectivity is more relevant to this type of exploratory research than attempted objectivity. It is worth noting that the data coding and analysis were based on written artifacts rather than teacher reporting and that the data were (double-) coded by other researchers not involved in the teaching process.

For educational designers and teachers, the limited set of skills selected does not imply that this design develops the full set of CT skills mentioned by Ennis and Facione; rather, we propose that some design elements could be integrated into and contribute to many existing and well-tested designs that aim for CT. The limited number of participants requires caution as to the generalizability of the proof-of-principle design (RQ1). Indeed, the results for RQ2 are based on only 13 students and should be seen mainly as reasonable evidence that this conceptualization can produce effective designs and that the design method can produce workable designs that can be implemented, analyzed, discussed, and optimized.

DBR addresses new educational challenges by refining and testing models that can be deployed in other contexts, and each new iteration is an extension of the theory (Barab 2006 ). Thus, rather than a specific design that teachers might adopt or reject, this design approach and the proposed conjectures in Section 3 can be used to create many learning designs for different curricular and cultural contexts or educational levels. The proposed principles-based design method can guide the design or adaptation of many learning environments for teaching delicate subjects. While this approach has been developed and tested in the context of SSIs raised by popularized neuroscience, the generativity of the design method is not restricted to this subject area and could be applied in many existing or future areas of bioscience in which progress is raising new SSIs and possibly to the more classic SSIs raised by GMOs or climate change. Introductory learning activities based on our design conjectures or inspired by the sample design could be used to develop decentering skills before engaging students in more challenging learning tasks, such as argumentation about SSIs. We propose that this design could contribute foundationally to enhance many of the excellent designs for teaching the CT skills needed by future citizens. For example, a classical problem with debating is that the debate revolves not around the value of the arguments but the personal sympathy or dislike felt towards those presenting their points (i.e., relational rather than epistemic resolution of conflict (Buchs et al. 2004 ). A preliminary intervention developing decentering skills might help students learn to take into account other points of view. It might be worth exploring whether this enhances the notable designs for argumentation in the classroom using strategies such as listening triads, argument lines, and jigsaw groups, which produced very disappointing results in Osborne et al.’s study (2013).

Taking into account the different forms that empathy can take and their influences on learning processes opens new avenues for research, not only about SSIs but possibly also in other areas where emotional reactions interfere with learning processes. For example, designs could be studied that introduce the immunological mechanisms of vaccination via an adapted form of this decentering approach, e.g., discussing—without personal opinions—various possible emotional reactions stemming from values, social belongings, and beliefs as respectable but as separate from the instructional goals. After such an introduction, instruction focused on using scientific models to explain or predict situations that are meaningful to the students might be more acceptable to many of them. This decentering educational approach could also support conceptual change. For example, Coley and Tanner ( 2015 ) show how anthropocentric thinking (among others) causes the persistence of many scientifically inaccurate ideas, often termed misconceptions. It might well be that the empathy elicited towards some scientific concepts interferes with student understanding. For example, discussing invasive species in the context of ecology in multicultural classes could elicit opposing emotional empathy responses from students of migrant origin and others with strong political views, which might hinder scientific understanding. It would be worth testing if such a problem could be headed off by a short sequence developing cognitive empathy through this decentering approach.

We have shown how this approach—firmly based on scientific methods literacy—brings up NOS questions such as how the claims have been established, why this question is addressed, and who is involved in the research, questions that are too often ignored in science education focused on definitive knowledge. Didactic transposition theory (Chevallard 1991 ) shows how difficult it is to escape this transformation of classroom knowledge. However, our results are in line with Hoskins et al. ( 2007 ), suggesting that it is possible to guide students to the primary literature and to discuss how scientific knowledge is validated, as many have called for, e.g., Abd-El-Khalick ( 2013 ). More research is needed to assess whether the decentering approach we propose might help classes discuss the NOS without the debate becoming biased or shaped by dogmatic positions such as pro-science or anti-science (as discussed in Section 4.2 with the article by deCharms et al. ( 2005 )).

The generalizability of this approach could be limited by the social acceptability of some of the CT dimensions it develops. For example, challenging collective interests and values (Jiménez-Aleixandre and Puig 2012 ) could be problematic in some schools. Since this design encourages students to imagine various people’s reactions based on their values and beliefs, schools and teachers must be able to accept students mentioning potential uses that could strongly conflict with their own personal or collective interests and values. This approach also requires teachers to have good decentering skills. Furthermore, frequent reference to primary literature and recent research techniques is a stimulating but challenging perspective that many teachers nevertheless learn to appreciate (as scientific literature is now easily accessible through the internet) (Lombard, Schneider & Weiss 2020 ).

Globally, this research suggests that applying this learning design approach for CT, which is focused on developing cognitive empathy during the processes of opinion building, could improve rational debate and contribute to CT teaching. Since it involves addressing challenging new problems, fosters authenticity (Lombard 2011 ), and can be adapted to local constraints and opportunities, it may be of interest to many teachers who struggle with teaching SSIs.

Author 1, also a lecturer and teacher trainer at anonymized university—see Section 6 for a discussion of how this dual researcher/practitioner role was taken into account when analyzing the data.

Full responses are available (in French) at this URL: http://tecfa.unige.ch/perso/lombardf/calvin/4OC/4OC_2018_Questionnaire_dvaluation_par_les_elves_en_fin_de_module.pdf )

The numbers in parenthesis are the count of mentions of this skill across all questions in the questionnaire; this value can exceed the number of students.

Available on request

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Prof Mireille Bertancourt and the TECFA lab at Geneva University for its stimulating climate, Dr. Vincent Widmer for constructive comments and designing Fig. 2 , all the students involved in the course over many years for their constructive comments that helped the design evolve, Dr. Emilie Qiao for insightful comments and suggestions about neuroscience research, and Mattia Fritz for constructive comments.

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The following codebook was used to code the progression of selected critical thinking skills (EE2 to EE4). Each OE item was coded on a 3-point scale (see the performance measures column).

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Lombard, F., Schneider, D.K., Merminod, M. et al. Balancing Emotion and Reason to Develop Critical Thinking About Popularized Neurosciences. Sci & Educ 29 , 1139–1176 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-020-00154-2

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The Link Between Emotional Intelligence and Critical Thinking

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Critical thinking can help you to identify reliable sources of information that you can cite in your research paper . It can also guide your own research methods and inform your own arguments.

Outside of academia, critical thinking can help you to be aware of both your own and others’ biases and assumptions.

Academic examples

However, when you compare the findings of the study with other current research, you determine that the results seem improbable. You analyze the paper again, consulting the sources it cites.

You notice that the research was funded by the pharmaceutical company that created the treatment. Because of this, you view its results skeptically and determine that more independent research is necessary to confirm or refute them. Example: Poor critical thinking in an academic context You’re researching a paper on the impact wireless technology has had on developing countries that previously did not have large-scale communications infrastructure. You read an article that seems to confirm your hypothesis: the impact is mainly positive. Rather than evaluating the research methodology, you accept the findings uncritically.

Nonacademic examples

However, you decide to compare this review article with consumer reviews on a different site. You find that these reviews are not as positive. Some customers have had problems installing the alarm, and some have noted that it activates for no apparent reason.

You revisit the original review article. You notice that the words “sponsored content” appear in small print under the article title. Based on this, you conclude that the review is advertising and is therefore not an unbiased source. Example: Poor critical thinking in a nonacademic context You support a candidate in an upcoming election. You visit an online news site affiliated with their political party and read an article that criticizes their opponent. The article claims that the opponent is inexperienced in politics. You accept this without evidence, because it fits your preconceptions about the opponent.

There is no single way to think critically. How you engage with information will depend on the type of source you’re using and the information you need.

However, you can engage with sources in a systematic and critical way by asking certain questions when you encounter information. Like the CRAAP test , these questions focus on the currency , relevance , authority , accuracy , and purpose of a source of information.

When encountering information, ask:

• Who is the author? Are they an expert in their field?
• What do they say? Is their argument clear? Can you summarize it?
• When did they say this? Is the source current?
• Where is the information published? Is it an academic article? Is it peer-reviewed ?
• Why did the author publish it? What is their motivation?
• How do they make their argument? Is it backed up by evidence? Does it rely on opinion, speculation, or appeals to emotion ? Do they address alternative arguments?

Critical thinking also involves being aware of your own biases, not only those of others. When you make an argument or draw your own conclusions, you can ask similar questions about your own writing:

• Am I only considering evidence that supports my preconceptions?
• Is my argument expressed clearly and backed up with credible sources?
• Would I be convinced by this argument coming from someone else?

If you want to know more about ChatGPT, AI tools , citation , and plagiarism , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• ChatGPT vs human editor
• ChatGPT citations
• Is ChatGPT trustworthy?
• Using ChatGPT for your studies
• What is ChatGPT?
• Chicago style
• Paraphrasing

 Plagiarism

• Types of plagiarism
• Self-plagiarism
• Avoiding plagiarism
• Academic integrity
• Consequences of plagiarism
• Common knowledge

Critical thinking refers to the ability to evaluate information and to be aware of biases or assumptions, including your own.

Like information literacy , it involves evaluating arguments, identifying and solving problems in an objective and systematic way, and clearly communicating your ideas.

Critical thinking skills include the ability to:

You can assess information and arguments critically by asking certain questions about the source. You can use the CRAAP test , focusing on the currency , relevance , authority , accuracy , and purpose of a source of information.

Ask questions such as:

• Who is the author? Are they an expert?
• How do they make their argument? Is it backed up by evidence?

A credible source should pass the CRAAP test  and follow these guidelines:

• The information should be up to date and current.
• The author and publication should be a trusted authority on the subject you are researching.
• The sources the author cited should be easy to find, clear, and unbiased.
• For a web source, the URL and layout should signify that it is trustworthy.

Information literacy refers to a broad range of skills, including the ability to find, evaluate, and use sources of information effectively.

Being information literate means that you:

• Know how to find credible sources
• Use relevant sources to inform your research
• Understand what constitutes plagiarism
• Know how to cite your sources correctly

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search, interpret, and recall information in a way that aligns with our pre-existing values, opinions, or beliefs. It refers to the ability to recollect information best when it amplifies what we already believe. Relatedly, we tend to forget information that contradicts our opinions.

Although selective recall is a component of confirmation bias, it should not be confused with recall bias.

On the other hand, recall bias refers to the differences in the ability between study participants to recall past events when self-reporting is used. This difference in accuracy or completeness of recollection is not related to beliefs or opinions. Rather, recall bias relates to other factors, such as the length of the recall period, age, and the characteristics of the disease under investigation.

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Emotional-Cognitive Biases – Seeing and Fixing Them

Our emotional-cognitive biases (ECBs) are feeling and thinking traits, habits, and styles that are by definition not adaptive. ECBs give us a false picture of reality, and predictably skew us into predictable, inappropriate ways of action.

These are commonly called cognitive biases , but the reality is that both our unconscious intuition and emotion ( System 1 ) and our conscious deliberation and cognition ( System 2 ) can express biases, and either or both systems can be in need of debiasing. Decomposing our biases into these two systems, and looking for how they are triggered, can be particularly helpful for debiasing ourselves. We can typically “talk our way out” of System 2 biases, but we can’t do that with System 1 biases, as they are largely unconscious.

We could call them Unconscious-Conscious Biases (UCBs) to be more accurate, but Feeling-Thinking Biases (Emotional-Cognitive Biases) is an easier to remember label. We talked about values, goals, models, and strategy biases in Chapter 1, as conscious (System 2) biases that we can’t avoid. When they are adaptive, don’t call those biases, but simply good values, goals, models, and strategies. Again, we can talk or think our way out of many of our System 2 biases, and those aren’t the topic of this section.

All ECBs, in our definition, always have at least some unconscious component to them, and per the 95/5 rule, that unconscious part is typically by far the largest contributor. We are typically unaware of that System 1 component. Fortunately, we can be aware of the System 2 (cognitive) component, and that awareness can allow us to work in conscious ways, to reduce both the System 2 component (talking our way out of our prejudices, which sometimes works) and the System 1 component, retraining our unconscious feelings and thoughts with various debiasing techniques .

Seeing our and others ECBs is thus great anticipatory personal foresight. Working to fix them can greatly improve our strategic foresight and action, and so is a worthy and lifelong challenge.

The figure below (available as a wall poster  to remind you of your humanity) is a beautiful compilation of 188 cognitive biases , in four main groups, brilliantly categorized by Buster Benson , and illustrated by John Manoogian III , using Wikipedia’s ever-growing  List of (Emotional-)Cognitive Biases .

Here then is a small list of biases, sorted into these two categories.

Less Recognized  Biases:

• Audience/Marketability Bias (Overattention to marketable, sensational info. Many media stories are written with a marketability bias, such that complex, equivocal, or otherwise less interesting results are simply not reported.)
• Biocentric Bias (seeing our future only through our own biological desires. Ignoring technology and society as learning systems.)
• Chemophobia (an unjustified fear of chemicals, whether manufactured or natural, as with allergens. Both in our diet and in our environment.)
• Confirmation/Selection Bias (Selective attention to information confirming one’s preconceptions. Aka a “filter bubble.” Compare to homogeneity bias.)
• Deliberative-Logical (System 2) Bias (Overattention to or overvaluing of one’s slow, deliberative, logical intelligence)
• Exteriorization/Somatization Bias (Overattributing events to exterior vs interior causes, or overattending to exterior information sources)
• Groupthink/Response Bias (Always following the leader’s or the group’s response.)
• Homogeneity Bias (Nonrandomness of a sample or nondiversity of a group, “echo chamber” or “filter bubble”)
• Intuitive-Emotional (System 1) Bias (Overattention to or overvaluing of one’s fast, intuitive, emotional intelligence)
• Interiorization/Asperger’s Bias (Overattributing events to interior vs exterior causes, or overattending to interior information sources)
• Loss/Risk Aversion Bias (Greatly preferring avoiding losses or risks to acquiring gains or opportunities)
• Omission/Inactivity Bias (Belief that a harmful action is always worse than a harmful omission)
• Optimism Bias (Costs/risks/limits are systematically discounted. Tends to decrease w/ experience/age.)
• Overdetermination Bias (Believing the future is more predictable, in more ways or precision, than it actually is.)
• Pessimism Bias (Opps/benefits/freedoms systematically discounted. Tends to increases w/ exp/age.)
• Recall/Framing Bias (Recall/Overattention to recently “cognitively primed” language or events)
• Rhyme-as-Reason Bias (Claims or aphorisms are judged as more accurate or truthful when they are rewritten to rhyme)
• Safety/Conservatism Bias (Overconservative communication and behavior, fear of failure or criticism)
• Superstition Bias (irrational belief or practice arising from ignorance, misunderstanding causality, supernatural thinking, or fear of the unknown)
• Undetermination Bias (Believing the future is freer, is less predictable or constrained, than actually it is.)

Socially Recognized Biases:

• Ability/Disability Bias  (inequitable treatment or rights by physical ability/disability)
• Age Bias (justifying or causing inequitable treatment or rights by age)
• Class Bias (justifying or causing inequitable treatment or rights by social class)
• Gender Bias  (justifying or causing inequitable treatment or rights by race/ethic group)
• Race/Ethnic Bias (justifying or causing inequitable treatment or rights by race/ethnic group)
• Political Affirmation Bias (inequitable treatment or rights by political affiliation)

Let’s briefly discuss a few of these biases now. We’ll explore more in a later version of the Guide .

We will discuss  Biocentric Bias in Chapter 7, as the source of many popular but mistaken fantasies about the human future.

Experiment: Superstitious Behavior in Humans (YT, 3 min)

Consider Superstition Bias , which is particularly common in societies dominated by orthodox (nonreform) religions, or where there is no strong rational, scientific education. In the late 1940’s, the psychologist B.F. Skinner did experiments with pigeons demonstrating how easy it was to get them to build irrational models of cause and effect. People, unfortunately, are just as susceptible to irrational thinking, particularly in groups. See this lovely video excerpt, Experiment: Superstitious Behavior in Humans  (YouTube, 3 min) from Season 2, Ep 6 of the TV Show Trick Or Treat (2008) in which a number of people are placed in a room with a counter, a video monitor, and several objects, and a large sign telling them to score 100 points with the objects within 30 minutes to retrieve a reward. A less obvious sign indicated a much larger reward was available by simply walking out of the room after a time, but the participants did not notice that, as they were so focused on figuring out the “puzzle” of scoring points with the objects. The points were awarded randomly by researchers, but at the end of the event, all the participants except one presumed that their behaviors influenced the counter. They were “fooled by randomness”, attributing causal reward to their actions in irrational ways. Only one participant did not fall victim to the bias.

Consider Exteriorization/Somatization Bias , the overfocusing on bodily problems or symptoms (including one’s own body or behavior in relation to society), and the misattribution of the vast majority of them to to exterior causes (physical things, other people’s behavior) versus interior, emotional-cognitive causes. This is a big bias afflicting all societies as their wealth and leisure grows, and it helps us understand many of the psychosomatic medical ills that affect people in the developed world.

Physicians talk about a mood and thinking disorder called somatization , where people with psychological pain focus on negative symptoms in various body systems other than their brain, and misattribute their natural depression or other temporary mental problems to the problems with those body systems. The causes are usually assumed to be external physical actors (toxins, pathogens, traumas), often operating via hidden and improbable causes. Misattributing one’s own problems to other people’s actions or behaviors, sometimes including their secret behaviors, is closely related to this, social biases that probably deserves its own name (perhaps Scheming/Conspiracy bias?).

Somatization/Exteriorization bias occurs when we blame our present emotional-cognitive condition on exterior factors or actors impacting our body and brain health. An alcoholic who blames all their life problems on their environment, but not on their internal emotional-cognitive states, including alcohol addition, would be one example. Many physicians expect that maladies like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome , while perhaps caused by exterior viruses or pathogens in some fraction of cases, may more commonly be due to internal metabolic dysregulation, or neural dysregulation, as atypical or subclinical depression, either of which may be amenable to interior focus and therapy.

For a balanced look at CFS, read this 2009 post on CFS by the late Wally Sampson. In the post he explores how even normally highly rational groups like the NIH and Science magazine fall victim to bias when they announce that “CFS, a debilitating disease that affects millions of people, may be associated with the retrovirus XMRV.”  This conclusion may be an overgeneralization, an audience bias that fits nicely into the somatization bias of current wealthy cultures. Samson reminds us that the best supported theory by far about CFS is that it is mostly a somatization (emotional-cognitive dysregulation) disorder, with viral and other physical causes affecting at most a small fraction of CFS sufferers. He also makes a few socially uncomfortable points. In his view, many CFS presenters have poor emotional self-awareness, and are resistant to introspection and cognitive behavioral therapy. I’d love to see a study to refute or validate that assessment.

We somatize/exteriorize when we look first for pills to cure our problems, enriching Big Pharma far more than it deserves (and for how they make sure the legal and social systems enable that bias, see Jacky Law’s excellent Big Pharma , 2006). It’s why we fall victim to fad scam health care products like Baltic amber necklaces to hang around our infants neck, in an attempt to minimize their teething pain. Read this nice post at Science Based Medicine , John Synder, Amber Waves of Woo , 2014, explaining Amber Teething Necklace quackery. What our babies need instead is a good sleep, social interaction, love and caring, and parental recognition that teething pain is endurable and temporary. What we need in such cases is a more interior focus, accepting that we, not the environment, are the major “problem”, and working to understand and mediate the sources of our psychic pain.

Making these kinds of assessments of others or ourselves, whether evidence-backed or not, is taboo in many otherwise-developed societies, even though we know that our mood and emotional states can be changed when we focus on them. Instead, we still too often prefer to look outward first, looking for any easy cure that require no self-change. That kind of outward-focused belief in the sources of our problems has become a dogmatic bias, for all of us, for various issues or conditions, at various points in our lives. Yet we can improve our emotional and cognitive thinking at any and all points in our lives, if we only become aware of our issues and use good process.

With respect to socially recognized biases, social psychology tests like the implicit-association test (IAT) can quickly uncover our automatic (unconscious) mental associations, but it’s hard to know when those associations are harmful biases and when they are useful judgments, based on real evidence.

Uncovering our unconscious associations with the IAT

For useful and for some, controversial example, men in almost all cultures commit various violent crimes nine times (to a rough approximation) more often than women. That is a useful mental association, not a bias. Likewise with criminal profiling, which is consciously and effectively done in some countries, while remaining unconscious in many other countries.

Such group-specific biases are complicated to discuss and treat, because we often make the commendable social decision to try to become blind to these distinctions, even encoding such blindness in our law, as we’ve been so harmfully biased against so many social groups for so long. That can be a useful ideal, yet useful mental associations and judgments around social issues will continue to exist, despite our ideals. Figuring out which of these judgments are acceptable, in a world seeking more social equity is the challenge.

Fortunately, our general emotional-cognitive biases typically don’t have this history of social injustice attached to them, so it should not be hard to build online IATs which help us discriminate between biased and useful judgments. Unfortunately, few such tests exist today to my knowledge, or at least aren’t in common use, and online general ECB unlearning and retraining tools are even harder to find. We may need a decade of further psychological research, and smarter and more pervasive digital systems before good general ECB tests and debiasing tools emerge.

In 2015 Facebook shared some of its unconscious social bias identification and unlearning tools at Managingbias.fb.com . Google did the same at Rework.withgoogle.com , their portal for sharing evidence-based human resources tools and practices. I’m proud to say my wife is on the Re:work team. These are great starts in addressing some of the more damaging social ECBs in the workplace. The Center for Applied Rationality (with the lovely acronym CFAR) is also doing good work trying to help us understand predictable failure patterns in human thinking and decision making. I’m hopeful we’ll see more free tools for managing all our ECBs in coming years.

Regarding general ECBs, intuitive-emotional ( System 1 ) bias and deliberative-rational ( System 2 ) bias may be the most obvious. If these are our two most central internal intelligences, it makes sense that one or the other will sometimes be overexpressed. We all know people, and clients, who are commonly too much “in their hearts” or “in their heads,” either on particular issues or in general. Being able to see this, and to meet these individuals where they are, yet also help them understand the other key intelligences, is a very important skill. As you gain their trust, you can help a person who doesn’t have enough deliberative-rational thought to see this, and to use that intelligence more, as well as help a hyperrational person who is out of touch with their intuitive-emotional intelligence to see it and express it better.

Optimism and pessimism biases are perhaps the next cognitive biases that we should briefly consider. Adjusting for them is particularly foundational to doing good foresight. In Chapter 1 we discussed the importance of maintaining a healthy optimism/pessimism ratio in our feelings and thoughts, and the difficulty of doing that as we age, and in a culture and media with a strong fear, pessimism and negativity reporting bias. Recall that neuroscientist Dilip Jeste recommends a roughly 2:1 ratio of internal (not communicated) optimism to pessimism thinking and feeling. In other words, he recommends having two different strategic optimism (vision, opportunity) thoughts for every one defensive pessimism (realism, caution) thought, on a moment-by-moment basis. Psychologist John Gottman has also published evidence that a 5:1 ratio of external (communicated) statements and actions are necessary to keep intimate relationships healthy and happy, in the workplace and in life. This ratios are first approximations today, and they need more evidence to back them up. But I find them excellent initial rules of thumb, and recommend them to you.

Of course, people are going to have ratios that fill a normal distribution around the population average, whatever that is in each culture. A good manager knows that people with naturally different ratios will be strongest at different tasks, and seeks to guide team members to tasks that best fit their strengths. People who are low-ratio strategic optimists (perhaps ranging from 2:1 to 4:1) are likely to make great managers, marketers, and salespeople, for example. Such folks may excel at growth and competitive strategy, and setting realistic stretch goals for their teams.

Naïve polyannas (as, for example, a 10:1 ratio optimist) would be dangerous to have in such a position, and would benefit from professional help with their extremism. Folks who are low-ratio defensive pessimists (perhaps 1:2 to 1:4 in their typical optimistic to pessimistic ratio of thoughts) can make great deputy managers and legal and security staff. They often excel at supporting the leaders, uncovering all the ways things might go wrong (responsible for worrying and precaution), and generally running organizational defense. High-ratio pessimists, by contrast, would be too rigid and self-blinkered to be good deputy leaders. They would be collaboration killjoys that you’d want to quickly identify and move out of any critical positions wherever team morale and dynamics matter.

Where do you presently fit on the optimism:pessimism ratio spectrum, in your internal thinking? In your external communications and actions with others? In a typical waking day, what would you say is your average ratio of opportunity to caution thoughts? Is it usually appropriate for your contexts? We must learn to see our biases, and adjust for them where they don’t help us. We also need to understand the larger social trends of optimism and pessimism in normal human populations and our particular culture, and the traps they create.

For example, with respect to ourselves, our relationships, and our children, at least up to our middle age, many of us are at least mildly overly optimistic. Some positive self-deceptions are healthy. We can recover from trauma faster, and set higher goals, as Shelly Taylor argues in Positive Illusions , 1991. But overoptimism can also be disempowering. When we think “I’m OK, you’re OK”, we don’t try to change, and wake up in a future where we’ve done nothing to better our lot. It doesn’t serve us well when most Americans see ourselves and our children as above average on almost all the key performance indicators, when only 49% can ever be so in reality. When we are overly optimistic, we don’t know our weaknesses, risks, and threats and may not see and change what isn’t working. Along with bias and fear, too much personal ego is one of many reasons we can neglect discussing things that need to be clarified, challenged, or changed.

We can even fall down a slippery slope into narcissism (considered a personality disorder, a particularly predictable and maladaptive collection of biases) becoming addicted to entertaining fantasies and self-images rather than sometimes hard but useful realities. Twenge and Campbell’s The Narcissism Epidemic , 2010, is a great overview of this trap. Narcissists tend to avoid conflict, and anything that punctures their optimism story. Borderline personality disorder is another harmful set of biases. We won’t discuss personality disorders much in this edition of the Guide .

Some of us go the other way on this ratio, becoming overly pessimistic and neurotic with respect to ourselves, our children, or our teams. Smith’s The User’s Guide to the Human Mind , 2011, explores that trap and offers good advice for getting out of it. Getting the right balance of personal and relationship optimism and pessimism, for the context, is key. If too much pessimism or optimism is an issue, neuroscientist Elaine Fox’s Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain (2012) outlines evidence-based procedures to reliably dampen and retrain fear and negativity circuits for pessimists, and to dampen pleasure-seeking and risktaking circuits for optimists, at any age. Such mental retraining takes time, commitment, and expertise, and is greatly aided by an empowered support network.

With respect to our organizations and societies, recall also that many of us, as we age, are overly pessimistic about the dangers and opportunities for positive change in our societies, due to our evolutionary, aging, and cultural pessimism biases. Jeste reminds us that we need to learn to see what’s working well with “two-thirds of our mind,” on average, and keep improving those things, rather than constantly complaining about what we don’t like, a convenient route to abdicating personal responsibility to drive change. Seeking to be a 2/3 organizational and social optimist and a 1/3 pessimist helps us see and use what’s working to fix those things that still need improving.

I’ve been accused of being too optimistic by a few folks, when I talk about accelerating technological change, and developmental immunity and morality. But in my defense, I’ve never said all this acceleration is going to be good for us. Only that it’s baked into the universe, and we apparently can’t stop it, as a universal process. What we can do is make its path and consequences better or worse for humanity. We have great moral choice over the path we take to this brave new world of technological life forms that apparently lies ahead, when we take an honest Big Picture view.

Patterson et al. (2011)

For two excellent primers on communication life skills that promote personal foresight, see Patterson et al.’s Crucial Conversations , 2011 and Stone et al’s Difficult Conversations (2010). These books make clear that both strategic optimism and defensive pessimism, combined with a strong desire to clarify probable, possible, and preferable futures, can greatly improve work and life outcomes. We must use difficult conversations, conducted with empathy, to move beyond bias, ego, fear, and other blocks to truth, to get to a more accurate set of future perceptions, in ourselves, our relationships, and our teams. We can also use these conversations to keep ourselves balanced productively between strategic optimism and defensive pessimism on our teams, as we will discuss now.

Stone et al. (2010)

With respect to our organizations, we noted how toxic groupthink bias can be in Chapter 1. Whether it’s the Yes-person ( sycophant ) variety (unquestioning obedience to the leader) or the herd behavior variety (unquestioning obedience to the crowd), groupthink kills cognitive diversity. Perhaps the most common groupthink trap is the overly optimistic group. Everyone knows a few naive Polyannas, folks who regularly slide into too-sunny or even foolishly utopian ways of looking at things. Too much optimism is another dangerous kind of groupthink.

Klein (2015)

If a good psychological balance is to be twice as optimistic as we are pessimistic, on average, how do we stop ourselves from becoming too optimistic? Fortunately some good solutions exist. Let’s look at one now.

In the 1980’s, psychologist Gary Klein , a leader in the field of decision making research, developed the premortem foresight method specifically to address overoptimistic groupthink. Whenever any group leader thinks their group is being too overoptimistic or herd-like, their job is to challenge everyone to temporarily take the opposite position. The leader announces that the star project is “dead”, and they are to now imagine that it has failed in a major, public, and embarrassing way, and give three plausible reasons why it failed over the next few minutes.

Self-preventing prophecies (SPPs)  are a milder variation of the premortem. An SPP is a story we tell about the  possibility  of failure ahead . When the failure and its risk are appropriately described, the SPP elevates our caution and risk awareness, and motivates people to make painful changes to prevent the prophecy, changes they would otherwise resist. Everyone uses SPPs. The danger for pessimists is that they like to turn SPPs into scare stories , greatly inflating the description of the failure and its likelihood. They do this with good intentions, but the effect is often counterproductive, getting people scared for no good reason, and diverting their energy from the good work they were previously doing, to discuss the silly scare story.

When SPPs and premortems are mentioned, by either leaders or team members, they allow the pessimists in a group to give feedback without fear of retribution. They also help the team to rekindle defensive pessimism, both in the individual and in the group. For more, see Klein’s Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decisionmaking , 2011, and Seeing What Others Don’t , 2015. Premortems , and their cousins, self-preventing prophecies , are very useful tools that leaders can use to prevent overoptimistic groupthink.

Overpessimism is another trap for some groups. We mentioned appreciative inquiry as one method to help groups start to move out of that trap. Leaders of such groups can also do visioning exercises, the opposite of premortems, tasking the group to imagine great success with current or new programs. Books like the previously mentioned Rieger’s Breaking the Fear Barrier , 2011, and Ryan and Oestreich’s Driving Fear Out of the Workplace , 1998 can help diagnose fear, a common emotional reason for pessimism. There may be a number of cognitive reasons as well, including toxic workplaces or learned helplessness . Acknowledging the problem and finding and addressing the most likely reasons is key to improving foresight in such organizations.

Cognitive Diversity on Teams is a Powerful Way to Reduce the Impact of Individual Bias

In our next section, we’ll discuss  cognitive diversity , and the way it reduces the impact of individual bias. As Scott Page describes in his deeply evidence-based book, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies (2008), teams of people who think differently from each other, and see the value of that different thinking, are far more adaptive than those living in non-evidence-based filter bubbles, manufacturing group visions that conform not to reality, but to their particular ways of looking at the world.

Thus two particularly helpful strategies for identifying and managing bias include cultivating emotional-cognitive diversity in your peers, and using emotional-cognitive behavioral therapy on yourself and in your relationships. Let’s briefly discuss each of these now.

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Preface Testimonials Acknowledgments How to Read The Foresight Guide

Chapter 1: Introduction Our Emerging Foresight Field

I.  Introduction

What is Foresight? Why Think About The Future? Two Questions and Four Goals of Foresight What is the Foresight Field? Futurists and Foresighters Foresight Professional: A Simple Definition Four Domains of Adaptive Foresight Six Ps of Strategic Foresight Eight Skills of Adaptive Foresight: The Do Loop Twenty Specialty Practices The 80/20 and 95/5 Rules History Matters! Historical Foresight Analysis Foresight Matters! Progress Opportunities Lost A Vision of Foresight Culture

II.   Key Personal Practice Challenges

1.  Being Explicit, Quantitative and Scientific 2.  Valuing Probabilistic Foresight 3. Seeing Hard and Soft Trends 4. Making Critical Judgments 5. Telling the Four Story Genres 6. Creating Good Progress Stories 7. Balancing Optimism, Pessimism and Realism 8. Building Strong Relationships

III.  The State of the Field

Foresight’s Great Myth Foresight’s Open Secret Do Loop: The Eight Skills of Practice Proof Points: The Four Foresight Skills How Large is Our Community? What Do We Call Ourselves? Foresight Training Options Foresight Certifications Foresight Courses Primary Foresight Associations Foresight Networks and Jobs

IV.  A Brief History and Future

Six Eras of Foresight Practice Our New Plutocracy Digital Pathways Out A Foresight Renaissance Ahead

V.  What Will Your Contribution Be?

Chapter 2: Personal Foresight Becoming an Effective Self-Leader

I.  Introduction to Personal Foresight

The Right Fights: The Ladder of Self-Leadership Knowing Yourself: The Deepest Journey Five Mindsets of Personal Foresight Our Life Priorities: The HRVWE Success Codes Health – Vital Cycles: Cyclic Habits for Vitality Relationships – Attributes of Happiness Vision – Five Goals and Ten Values Work – Four Steps and Eight Skills Environment – Mental and Physical Priorities Daily Mantras – Affirmations, Priorities, Values Emotion, Cognition, and Action: A Primal Do Loop Intelligence – Five Basic Types Emotional & Social Intell. – Primal Challenges Cognitive, Tech & Envir Intell. – New Challenges Emotional-Cognitive Biases – Seeing and Fixing Emotional-Cognit. Diversity – A Key to Excellence Emotional-Cognit. Behav. Therapy & Self-Therapy Passion vs. Mastery – Competing Career Drivers Practice and Expertise – 10,000 Hours and More

II.  Trait and Strength Assessments

Hedgehogs and Foxes – Two Personality Types Big Five Personality Traits A Sixth Trait – Social Dominance Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Gallup’s StrengthsFinder Core Leadership Skills and Traits Gallup’s Four Leadership Domains Adaptive Self-Leadership – Key Skills and Values Self-Leadership Traps – The Eight Skills

III. Evo Devo Psychology

Three Universal Cognitive Styles

1.  The Anticipator (Forecaster-Protector) 2.  The Creative (Experimenter-Innovator) 3.  The Manager (Strategist-Planner)

Universal Values Types and Sets

IV. Habits and Tools

The Power of Habits Achievmnt Groups: Juntos, Masterminds, Fusions Task Management and Journaling: Your Actualizer Career Planning: Where Will You Go Next?

Chapter 3: Career Options Great Ways to Be a Foresight Leader

I.  Foresight and Leadership

Your Foresight Brand

II.  Top Roles for Foresight Leaders

1.  Consultant 2.  Academic 3.  Creative 4.  Entrepreneur 5.  Organizational Foresighter

III.  Industry Practice Options

Twenty-Six Industry Groups Four Classic Economic Sectors

1.  For-Profits 2.  Government 3.  Education 4.  Nonprofits

The FEMMIT Complex: Why Finance, Energy, Medicine, Military & IT Industries are Influence Leaders

IV. Departmental Practice Options

1.  Top Management 2.  Metrics & Planning 3.  Security & Risk Mgmt 4.  Human Resources 5.  Operations 6.  Sourcing 7. Information Technology 8.  Research & Development 9.  Sales 10.  Marketing 11.  Customer Service 12.  Community Relations

Chapter 4: Models Foundations for Organizational Foresight

I.  Systems, Models and Frameworks

Statistical Surveys and Consulting

II.  Category Models

1.  Evolution and Development 2.  Toffler’s Three Foresight Skills 3.  Gallup’s Leadership Domains 4.  Spreckley’s Triple Bottom Line 5.  Wilber’s Integral Quadrants 6.  Humphrey’s SWOT Quadrants 7.  Gartner’s Market Quadrants 8.  Porter’s Five Forces

III.  Decision Cycle Models

1.  Delphi Opinion Cycle 2.  Eltville’s Five Foresight Perspectives 3.  APF-Houston’s Six Strategic Foresight Activities 4. 4U’s Eight Skills of Foresight Practice 5.  Kotter’s Eight Steps of Change Management 6.  Shewhart’s Learning and Deming’s Quality Cycle 7.  Simon’s Design Thinking Cycle 8.  Boyd’s Competitive Dominance Cycle 9.  Beck’s Agile Devel. & Ries’s Lean Startup Cycle 10.  Learn-See-Do-Review Cycle (The Do Loop)

IV. Change Curves and Other Cycle Models

1.  Dator’s Four Futures 2.  Logistic Growth (S-curves) 3.  Exponential Growth (E-curves) 4.  Superexponential Growth (J-curves) 5.  Power Law Growth (L-curves) 6.  Kuznets Cycles (U-curves) 7.  Life Cycles (B-curves and C-curves) 8.  Hype Cycles (Growth curves with hype) 9.  Economic Cycles (Boom-Bust Pendulum) 10.  Inequality Cycles (Plutoc.-Democ. Pendulum) 11.  Indiv, Organizatnl & Social Values (Life Cycles) 12.  Generational and Social Values (Irreg. Cycles)

V.  Practice Frameworks

1.  Mahaffie’s Foresight Initiation Framework 2.  4U’s Eight Skills Foresight Practice Framework 3.  Horizon Scanning Framewrks (PEST to STEEPS) 4.  Houston’s Foresight Research Framework 5.  Foltigo’s Future Value Generation Framework

Chapter 5: The Do Loop: The Eight Skills of Adaptive Foresight

I.  4U’s Eight Skills of Adaptive Foresight

Skill 1. Learning – Your History and Status Skill 2. Anticipation – Probability Foresight Skill 3. Innovation – Possibility Foresight Skill 4. Strategy – Preference Foresight Skill 5. Execution – Getting Somewhere Skill 6. Influence – Recruiting Others Skill 7. Relating – Sustaining Your Team Skill 8. Reviewing – Staying On Target

II. Introduction to Adaptive Leadership

Chapter 6: Methods and Frameworks Building Adaptive Foresight Skills

I.  Methods of Adaptive Foresight

Set 1. Learning Methods Set 2. Anticipation Methods Set 3. Innovation Methods Set 4. Strategy Methods Set 5. Execution Methods Set 6. Influence Methods Set 7. Relating Methods Set 8. Reviewing Methods

II.  Specialty Focus – Investing as Foresight Practice

III. Method Focus – Learning via Reading  

IV.  Foresight Practice Frameworks

1.  Mahaffie’s Foresight Initiation Framework 2.  Horizon Scanning Framewrks (PEST to STEEPS) 3.  Houston’s Foresight Research Framework 4.  Foltigo’s Future Value Generation Framework

V.  Further Reading in Foresight Methods

Chapter 7: Acceleration Guiding Our Extraordinary Future (In Process)

I. Three Views of Change

VUCA: A Defensive View of Change CIBA: An Opportunistic View of Change I4S: An Evo Devo View of Change

II. Global Progress: 5 Goals, 10 Values, Many Trends

Innovation: Our Abundant Future Intelligence: Our Augmented Future Interdependence: Our Civil Future Immunity: Our Protected Future Sustainability: Our Rebalanced Future

III.  Universal Accelerating Change

Great Race to Inner Space: Our Surprising Future Entropy&Information: We’re Running Down & Up The Puzzle of Meaning: We Have No Einstein Yet Trees, Funnels & Landscapes: Intro to Evo Devo Big Picture Change: Five Scales of Accelerating ED Transcension Hypothesis: Where Acceleratn Ends? IDABDAK: Social Response to Accel & Developmnt We’re On a Runaway Train: Being Accelaware

IV. Evo Devo and Exponential Foresight

Seeing It All: Accel., Diverg, Adapt, Convrg, Decel. Natural (I4S) Innovation: The Evolutionary Drive Natural (I4S) Intelligence: The Human-AI Partnership Natural (I4S) Morality: Why Empathy and Ethics Rule Natural (I4S) Security: Strength from Disruption Natural (I4S) Sustainability: The Developmental Drive S-Curves: Managing the Four Constituencies Pain to Gain: Traversing the Three Kuznets Phases Hype to Reality: Beyond Hype Cycles to Reality Checks Exponentials Database: Measuring Accelerations TINA Trends: Societal Evolutionary Development Managing Change: STEEPCOP Events, Probs, Ideas A Great Shift: A Survival to a Sentient Economy

V. Evo Devo and Exponential Activism

Building Protopias: Five Goals of Social Progress Normative Foresight: Ten Values of Society Top & STEEPCOP Acceleratns: Positive & Negative Dystopias, Risks, and Failure States Three Levels of Activism: People, Tech & Universe A Great Opportunity: Exponential Empowerment

Chapter 8: Your Digital Self The Human Face of the Coming Singularity (In Process)

I. Your Personal AI (PAI): Your Digital Self

Digital Society: Data, Mediation, and Agents Personal AIs: Advancing the Five Goals PAI Innovation: Abundance and Diversity PAI Intelligence: Bio-Inspired AI PAI Morality: Selection and Groupnets PAI Security: Safe Learning Agents PAI Sustainability: Science and Balance The Human Face of the Coming Singularity

II. PAI Protopias & Dystopias in 8 Domains

1.  Personal Agents   : News, Ent., Education 2.   Social Agents   : Relat. and Social Justice 3.  Political Agents  :  Activism & Represent. 4.  Economic Agents   :  Retail, Finance, Entrep 5.   Builder Agents :   Work, Innov. & Science 6.   Environ. Agents :    Pop. and Sustainability 7.   Health Agents  :  Health, Wellness, Death 8.   Security Agents  :  Def., Crime, Corrections

III. PAI Activism & Exponential Empowerment

Next Government: PAIs, Groupnets, Democ. Next Economy: Creat. Destr. & Basic Income Next Society: PAI Ent., Mortality & Uploading What Will Your PAI Contribution Be?

Chapter 9: Trends and Progress Leading Positive Change

I. 4U’s Futurepedia: Envisioning Social Progress

II. Sci and Tech (S&T) Foresight: Trends & Progress Visions

1. Information Sci and Technologies Overview 2. Nano Sci and Technologies Overview 3. Resource Sci and Technologies Overview 4. Engineering Sci and Technologies Overview 5. Cognitive Sci and Technologies Overview 6. Social Sci and Technologies Overview 7. Health Sci and Technologies Overview 8. Economic Sci and Technologies Overview 9. Political Sci and Technologies Overview 10. Security Sci and Technologies Overview

III. Societal (EEPS) Foresight: Trends & Progress Visions

1.  Sociocultural Foresight Overview

Cultures of China and the USA: Implications for Global Leadership

IV. Progress Hindsight Collection: Major Foresight Lost

A. Global 200 BCE: A Printing Press in Ancient Greece 50 CE: A Steam Engine in Ancient Rome 1000 CE: A Norse Democracy in America

B. United States 1896: Neoslavery Defeated (Reconstruction II) 1912: A Saved Titanic (Collaborative Foresight) 1938: A Ludlow Amendment (War Referendum) 1953: No US Coup in Iran – We Ally Instead 1955: Substantially Safer Cars 1965: A Defended South Vietnam (Vietnam War) 1970: A Fully-Realized EPCOT 1991: An Accountability Doctrine (Gulf War) 1993: Tablets and eBooks at the Birth of the Web 2000: Accelerated American Broadband 2007: An Autonomy Doctrine (Iraq War)

Chapter 10: Startup Ideas Great Product and Service Challenges for Entrepreneurs (In Process)

I. 4U’s Idea Hub: Building Better Futures

Air Deliveries and Air Taxis: Finally Solving Urban Gridlock Ballistic Shields and Gun Control: Protecting Us All from Lone Shooters Bioinspiration Wiki: Biomimetics and Bio-Inspired Design Brain Preservation Services: Memory and Mortality Redefined Carcams: Document Thieves, Bad Driving, and Bad Behavior Competition in Govt Services: Less Corruption, More Innovation Computer Adaptive Education (CAE): Better Learning and Training Conversational Deep Learning Devsuites: Millions of AI Coders Digital Tables: Telepresence, Games, Entertainment & Education Dynaships: Sustainable Low-Speed Cargo Shipping Electromagnetic Suspension: Nausea-Free Working & Reading in Cars Epigenetic Health Tests: Cellular Aging, Bad Diet, Body Abuse Feedback Fireline Explosives and Ember Drones: Next-Gen Fire Control Global English: Empowering the Next Generation of Global Youth Greenbots: Drone Seeders and Robotic Waterers for Mass Regreening High-Density Housing and Zoning: Making Our Cities Affordable Again Highway Enclosures and Trail Networks: Green and Quiet Urban Space Inflatable Packaging: Faster and Greener Shipping and Returns Internet of Families: Connecting People Over Things Kidcams: Next-Gen Security for Child Safety and Empowerment Kidpods: Indoor & Outdoor Parent-Assistive Toyboxes Microdesalination: Democratizing Sustainable Fresh Water Production Noise Monitors: Documenting and Reducing Noise Pollution Oceanside Baths: Sustainable Year Round Beach Enjoyment Open Blood Scanners: DIY Citizen Health Care Sensor Tech Open Streaming Radio: User-Centered Audio Creation and Rating Open Streaming Video: User-Centered Video Creation and Rating Open Values Filters: Social Rankers, Arg. Mappers, and Consensus Finders Personal AIs: Your Private Advisor, Activist, and Interface to the World Pet Empowerment: Next-Gen Rights and Abilities for Our Domestic Animals Safe Closets: Fire-, Earthquake-, and Intruder-Proof Retreat Spaces Safe Cars: Reducing Our Insane 1.3M Annual Auto Deaths Today Safe Motorcycles: Lane Splitting in Gridlock Without Risk of Death Shared Value Insurance: User-Centered Risk Reduction Services Sleeperbuses and Microhotels: Demonetized Intercity Travel Space-Based Solar Power: Stratellite Powering and Weather Management Stratellites: Next-Gen Urban Broadband, Transparency, and Security Touch DNA: Next-Gen Home Security and Crime Deterrence View Towers: Improving Urban Walkability, Inspiration, and Community

Chapter 11: Evo Devo Foresight Unpredictable and Predictable Futures

I.  Universal Evo Devo: A Model

What is Evolutionary Development? The VCRIS Model of Natural Selection Two Fundamental Tensions Three Universal Processes Four Systems of Change Five Hierarchies of Complex Systems Five Goals of Complex Systems Six Schools of Social Foresight Ten Values of Social Progress The 95/5 Rule: Most Change Looks Evolutionary Catalytic Catastrophes: Advancing the Five Goals Universal Devel.: A Hidden Actor in Social Change Portals (Funnels) and Convergent Evolution Incompleteness: The Limits of Science & Mind Adjacent Possible: Steam Engines to Neural Nets Grand Questions: Purpose & Place in the Universe Extraordinary Claims Dangers of the Model Benefits of the Model Testing the Model

II.  Evo Devo (Empowerment) Foresight

Seeing Both Evolution and Development Why & What vs. How, Who, Where & When 1.  Evolutionary Factors

A.  Stories, Causes, and Assumptions B.  Imagin., Combinatorls, Emerg. & Divergnces C.  Uncertnties, Unkns, Opps, Wildcards & Risks

2.  Developmental Factors

A.  Associatns, Trends, Dependncs & Constraints B.  Cycles, Curves, Models, and Laws C.  Convergences, Optima, and Predictions

Four Domains of Empowerment Foresight Practicing Empowerment Foresight with Clients

III.  Evo Devo (Empowerment) Activism

Emp. Society: Growing the 5 Goals & 10 Values Emp. Politics: Left Wing, Right Wing & Up Wing Emp.  Policy: S&T, IT, & Collective Intelligence Emp. Catalysts: 10K Folks & 10K Hrs to Next What Will Your Empowerment Contribution Be?

Chapter 12: Visions and Challenges Priorities for Professionals

I. Big Foresight: Visions of Emerging Practice

Acceleration and Evo Devo Aware Evidence-Based and Scientific Digital Data-Rich Probabilistic Collaborative Open Global Popular

II. Key Community Practice Challenges

Seeing Acceleration and Development Building Better Models and Definitions Grounding and Validating Our Scholarship   Professionalizing and Continuing Our Training Collaborating on Digital Foresight Platforms Marketing Our Ever-Growing Value to Clients

III. Common Practice Biases and Mistakes

Bias Against Personal Foresight Bias Against Probable Foresight Extremism Bias Hype Bias Drama Bias Clear View Bias Elitism Bias Monotrend Extrapolation Errors (MEEs) Underspecified Model Mistakes (UMMs)

IV. Problematic Social Roles

Clairvoyant Futurist Soothsaying Futurist Prosperity Futurist Dogmatic Futurist Utopian Futurist Dystopian Futurist Postmodernist Futurist Scriptural Futurist

V. Reaching for Better Foresight with Our Clients

Responsible Spiritual Foresight Life is Amazing; Spread the Word!

Appendix 1: Peer Advice Building a Successful Foresight Practice

I.  Introduction to Peer Advice

Survey Topics and Questions

II. Five Practitioner Groups

1.  Consultants Advice 2.   Academics Advice 3.  Creatives Advice 4.  Entrepreneurs Advice 5.  Organizational Foresighters Advice

III.  Takeaway: It’s Your Future

Appendix 2: Leaders Exemplary Foresight Practitioners and Organizations

I.  700 Foresight Leaders – One-Line Database

Futurist Blogs and Speakers The Future of Leader Lists Twitter as a Foresight Community

II. 500 Leading Foresight Organizations – Global List

Large Companies – Foresight Leaders Mid-Sized Companies – Foresight Leaders Management Consultancies – Implicit Leaders Larger Primary Foresight Consultancies Smaller Primary Foresight Consultancies University Research Centers & Consultancies Foresight Specialty & Industry Membership Orgs Foresight Education Universities & Organizations International, Governmental & Defense Agencies Government and Defense Contractors Industry, Policy & Public Interest Lobbying Orgs Internships that Can Involve Foresight Online Employment Communities and Platforms

Appendix 3: Resources Media and Tools for Better Futures

I. Great Foresight Media

Authorial Bias—Mine and Others’ Top Foresight Books Professional Foresight Books Global Foresight Books Global Foresight Reports Strategic Foresight Journals Strategic Foresight Magazines Foresight Audio and Podcasts Foresight Videos

II. Other Foresight Resources

Career Resources Serious Games Online Platforms Foresight Glossary

Emotional Self-Awareness Is Essential for Managing Biases

Left unchecked, biases lead to impaired thinking..

Posted September 15, 2021 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

• The Importance of Empathy
• Take our Empathy Test
• Find a therapist near me
• The skills required for cognitive empathy, such as perspective-taking, are entirely different from those required for emotional empathy.
• Emotional self-awareness is the mechanism through which humans are able to calibrate their moral and ethical compasses.
• Left unchecked, biases cause people to constrict and distort the information they receive, understand, and consider.

Many people incorrectly believe that they possess a wealth of empathy by virtue of their training, licensure, and profession. They frequently hold this belief because they have been trained in and regularly engage in perspective-taking , which is known as cognitive empathy and which Daniel Goleman has defined as “the ability to understand another person’s perspective.”

However, Goleman and others also refer to other types of empathy. The two other types of empathy Goleman refers to are emotional empathy and empathic concern, which he defines respectively as “the ability to feel what someone else feels” and “the ability to sense what another person needs from you.”

It bears mentioning that social science researcher Brene' Brown explains that empathy consists of the following five skills :

• Perspective taking;
• Being nonjudgmental;
• Understanding the other person’s feelings;
• Communicating your understanding; and
• Mindfulness .

Cognitive empathy is most certainly important; yet, it is not the type of empathy that is included as one of the twelve emotional intelligence competencies. As such, it does not require the development of any emotional intelligence skills.

The belief that one’s training, licensure, and regular practice of perspective-taking means that they possess a “wealth of empathy” is incredibly inaccurate. Furthermore, that belief causes people to think that they already possess and have honed at least some emotional intelligence skills. Not surprisingly, this belief discourages those holding it from putting in the time and effort required to develop and hone some or all of the emotional intelligence skills. After all, why develop something you already believe that you possess in spades?

The empathy which is an aspect of emotional intelligence is a skill, the foundation of which is emotional self-awareness.

The skill of emotional self-awareness is defined as “knowing what one feels.”

Emotional empathy is "an astute awareness of others’ emotions, concerns, and needs." It is not possible to be aware of and accurately understand other people’s emotions unless and until one is aware of and understands them in oneself. While emotional self-awareness can be learned, it is essential to distinguish between being taught a skill and learning it.

It bears mentioning that our emotions impact our perception of fairness, among other things. Fear keeps us safe from perceived danger, disgust (the emotion associated with perceptions of immorality) protects us from our perceived threat of being poisoned physically and socially, anger is a response to a perceived injustice, and sadness is a reaction to a perceived loss. While these perceptions may be real, they might also be exaggerated or completely imagined. As such, emotional self-awareness and bias management efforts go hand-in-hand.

As Dr. Brown has said, one of the skills required for empathy is nonjudgment. Untested assumptions and beliefs are biases.

People talk about engaging in "non-judgmental listening." However, it has been found that this is an impossible task because of how the human brain work. Fortunately, people can suspend judgment in order to listen to hear, understand and consider information. Suspending judgment is far easier said than done.

Once people have experienced something or formed an opinion about it, that becomes their default -- they no longer have a clean slate in that regard. They have, for all intents and purposes, become biased and pre-judge based upon their experience or opinion.

There is no training, licensure, or certification that causes someone to develop and hone their emotional self-awareness. For example, consider the following:

“ Unfortunately , the results of research on efforts to help judges to reduce or otherwise manage their biases have been rather disappointing. In fact, the research has shown that the effects of the training, if any, for most judges ‘generally declined after two weeks,’ as set forth by the Federal Judicial Center. To be clear, this does not mean that such efforts are entirely ineffective. As has already been said many times throughout this article, ‘admission is the first step to recovery.’ Unless people are required to take courses at which they learn about specific biases, how they are formed, their impact, and what a person can do to try to reduce or otherwise manage bias, people self-select the types of information to which they will and will not even expose themselves. Thus, those most in need of acquiring such information are typically the least likely to receive it, particularly if they believe they are not biased and that their explicit biases exist for good reason. Therefore, the only way to even attempt to promote awareness is through education programs and by requiring attendance.”

Left unchecked, biases cause people to constrict and distort the information they receive, understand and consider. The more constricted and distorted the information heard, understood and considered, the more impaired will be the thinking involved.

As if engaging in unimpaired thinking, to the extent possible, is not sufficient reason for people to want to develop and hone their emotional self-awareness, emotional self-awareness is the mechanism through which human beings are able to calibrate their moral and ethical compasses .

Fortunately, in 1994, Timothy D. Wilson and Nancy Brekke provided scientific proof that bias could be avoided or eliminated as follows:

• By becoming aware of the bias and why it exists;
• Having the motivation to overcome it;
• Awareness of the direction and magnitude of the bias; and
• The ability to apply an appropriate strategy to help reduce or otherwise manage the bias.

For what it is worth, the opposite of self-awareness is self-righteousness. If you find yourself feeling "morally superior to others," that should signal your need to develop your emotional self-awareness.

Goleman, D. (2013). ' The Focused Leader : How effective executives direct their own—and their organizations’—attention', Harvard Business Review.

Goleman, D. (2020). ' Harvard researcher says the most emotionally intelligent people have these 12 traits . Which do you have?', CNBC.

Goleman, D. (2001). An EI-Based Theory of Performance . In C. Cherniss, & D. Goleman (Eds.), The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace (p. 27, 36). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Baer, M., The Amplification of Bias in Family Law and its Impact , 32 J. AM. ACAD. MATRIM. L. 305, 328 (2020).

Wilson, T. & Brekke, N. (1994). Mental Contamination and Mental Correction: Unwanted Influences on Judgments and Evaluations, 116 PSYCHOL. BULL. 117.

Mark B. Baer, Esq. is a mediator, collaborative law practitioner, conflict resolution consultant, co-author of Putting Kids First in Divorce, and co-founder of Family Dynamics Assistance Center.

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