Tom Chatfield on critical thinking and bias

Podcast with author Tom Chatfield highlights the way critical thinking is lacking in today's generation, which author Tom Chatfield believes is the number one skill that everyone needs to have in order to compete in today's society. The lack however may come not from a mere lack of mental capacity, instead it comes from the lack of knowledge of ways to think more critically. "More and more we also need to roll into this the scientific and empirical method of seeking explanations, forming hypotheses, testing theories.” In the podcast he outlines what how bias is the biggest influences that prohibits from critically thinking. “Letting our emotional reaction double as truth, and be substituted for what we think of as truth,” is the biggest form of toxicity to thinking more critically.

What I mean by critical thinking, is our attempts to be more reasonable about the world.
— Tom Chatfield in interview with David Edmonds

To hear Tom Chatfield's Podcast click HERE. The podcast appears as part of the celebrated Social Science Bites podcast series which appears exclusively at the Social Science Space website. To see the entire catalog of past interviews with many of the planet’s most interesting social scientists, click HERE.


This blog post was written by Philip Patino employee at SAGE Publishing under PR Conventions and Social Science Department. As a SAGE employee he helps manage and edits the SAGE hosted sites MethodSpace and Social Science Space.

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