Thinking Clearly

Psychology Professor Alan Bensley discusses teaching critical thinking and recognizing unsubstantiated claims. Topics include measuring effectiveness of instruction, identifying unsubstantiated claims, and debunking conspiracy theories.

Psychologist Emlen Metz discusses her research on Actively Open-minded Thinking and her current work at the Lawrence Hall of Science at U.C. Berkeley developing curricula on scientific-critical-thinking for high school and undergraduate classrooms and her work on a project called Public Editor, described as: "a massive effort to clean up the news."

Journalist, author and public speaker Guy Harrison— a longtime advocate for skepticism, critical thinking and science appreciation—discusses the virtues, benefits and joy of critical thinking and how understanding core ideas in science can add value to all of our lives. Guy has authored eight books, including: Think Before You Like: Social Media's Effect on the Brain and the Tools You Need to Navigate Your Newsfeed and At Least Know This: Essential Science to Enhance Your Life.

Thinking Clearly guest, political scientist, author and educator Timothy Redmond, discusses the toxic effects of extreme political tribalism on our democratic institutions and offers hope and solutions—as detailed in his recent book: Political Tribalism in America: How Hyper-Partisanship Dumbs Down Democracy and How to Fix It.

Psychologist, author and entrepreneur, Gary Klein, joins us a second time to take a closer look at experts, skilled intuition and many of the other topics associated with Naturalistic Decision Making—a process of understanding how people make decisions and perform cognitively complex functions in demanding, real-world situations.

Mark Edward tells the story of his journey from the world of magicians and psychics to becoming a skeptical activist who promotes science and critical thinking. As a skilled practitioner of mentalism, Mark has authored a number of books on magic, mentalism, and séance production, including his revealing book: Psychic Blues. And, on this episode of Thinking Clearly, Mark will do a demonstration, with Julia, of how a mentalist-psychic reading is done.

The conjunction fallacy, base rate neglect and the Monty Hall Problem are some of the topics discussed as guest John Allen Paulos from Temple University offers up a host of essential critical thinking tools relating to understanding probability and other statistical concepts. Professor Paulos authored the widely acclaimed book, Innumeracy-Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences and will give listeners a preview of his new book: Who's Counting?: Uniting Numbers and Narratives with Stories from Pop Culture, Puzzles, Politics, and More.

Under very unusual conditions, Jon Guy made a transition from one who never thought much about skepticism, the nature of science and critical thinking to learning and mastering those topics and writing the excellent and comprehensive book: Think Straight—An Owner's Manual for the Mind—described on the Rowman & Littlefield web page as: "a tour de force through the science and philosophy of the human mind." In this episode, a variety of important tools for improving our thinking are discussed as Jon emphasizes that improving the quality of our thinking, improves the accuracy of our representation of reality, which leads to better decisions and a higher quality of life.

Our guest, Melanie Trecek-King, Associate Professor of Biology at Massasoit Community College, became dissatisfied with students mindlessly memorizing facts about biology, so she designed a general-education science course that puts less emphasis on facts and more on science and information literacy and critical thinking. Her commitment to these topics also prompted her to create the wonderful teaching and resource-filled website, which can be found on-line at: Thinking Is Power.

Dr. James Zimring, professor, medical researcher and author of the books What Science Is And How It Works and Partial Truths-How Fractions Distort Our Thinking, describes how the form of a simple fraction can be used as a conceptual framework to understand errors that we commonly make in our thinking. Many aspects of critical thinking are discussed, including: heuristics and biases, the advantages and disadvantages of our human tendency to perceive patterns, the primacy effect, the power of disconfirmation and what we can do to minimize errors in our thinking.