What is it about?
We compared the reasoning of undergraduate students in critical thinking classes (training group) and other undergraduate philosophy classes (control group). Training dramatically reduced 4 common biases in judgment and decision making: honoring sunk costs, inferring causation from correlation, ignoring regression to the mean, and overlooking opportunity costs. The size of the debiasing effects were substantial (Cohen’s d > 0.80) and persisted 16 months after the class ended.
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Why is it important?
This study shows that it's possible to dramatically improve how people think about everyday problems. Good critical thinkers make better judgments and wiser decisions. They are also essential to healthy democracies.
Perspectives
Pretty much everybody thinks they're a good critical thinker. I think this study suggests that for many of us, there's room - and perhaps a lot of room - for improvement.
Michael Bishop
Florida State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Critical thinking classes can reduce common biases: Results from a field experiment., Journal of Experimental Psychology Applied, April 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/xap0000571.
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