We’re continuing our series on Critical Thinking Red Flags, where we look at ways you can more easily spot dodgy content. In Part, we looked at people who make something seem too good to be true, so – fittingly, we’re going to dive into things that seem too bad to be true.
Fearmongering
Making something appear too bad to be true can be summed up by a single word, fearmongering. The speaker is trying to create as much fear in her audience as possible to get as much attention...
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One of the simplest but most underrated skills in critical thinking is knowing when to switch on your scepticism. When we hear information that sounds false or misleading, our scepticism kicks into gear and we question what we’re hearing. That way, we can check to see whether this information is credible. The trouble is, our scepticism doesn’t always switch on when it needs to and we can’t have it running all the time; that’s just too tiring and inefficient. What we nee...
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Is critical thinking the most important skill you’ll ever learn? To put any one skill into that prestigious position would take quite a sound argument. After all, there are so many skills that you rely on daily to get through work and life, how could you possibly pick anyone above another? My simple reason is that critical thinking influences everything we do.
Have you ever wondered why people believe things that seem blatantly crazy or get sucked into business ideas that are clearly a...
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Any crime thriller or detective show enthusiast knows that there are two main kinds of detective: the methodical one who processes and puzzles over information, connecting dots and formulating opinions from there, and the insightful one who has the sudden moments of revelation. A classic example of the former is Sherlock Holmes: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” Holmes’ methods are exhaustive and focuse...
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The Placebo Effect is certainly one of life’s stranger quirks. The fact that you can take a sugar pill and feel better simply because you thought you would is strange to most of us, and yet, it gets stranger still. Apparently, even if you know you’re receiving a placebo, you will experience similar effects to if you had been deceived into thinking it was real. A research article published in December 2017 in the concisely named Journal, Pain, detailed this phenomenon.
The research...
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