(April 2025)
How good are students at critical reading? Our study on upper secondary school students found there is much need for improvement, but that students with higher analytic thinking dispositions had better skills both at evaluating the credibility of online texts, and at distinguishing strong from weak arguments. The full-text of the paper is available open access here.
Another recent study looked at moral arguments for policies that make outcomes worse, and that contain argument fallacies. For example, can we argue against genetically modified crops on the grounds that many people favor a ban? This type of argument is generally considered weak because it is the fallacy from popularity. We found that the ability to recognize the flaws in these kind of arguments was positively related to valuing actively open-minded thinking - again highlighting the importance of individual differences in thinking dispositions. The full-text is available as a preprint here.
The third paper takes a deeper look at thinking dispositions. How do you know who are analytic thinkers? Is it those who say they enjoy thinking, those who admit they may be wrong, or those who are good at trick questions? This paper shows that the choice of assessment method matters because different methods identify different subpopulations of thinkers. Importantly, only some of them excel at evaluating arguments, at distinguishing false headlines from real ones, and the groups even differ in how profound they find nonsense to be and how much they endorse conspiracy theories. To find out how types of analytic thinkers differ, read the full-text here.
Tuukka and Annika presented the research group at the science fair (Tiedefestarit) organized by the psychology student organization Kompleksi on November 12th.