There are plenty of articles and commentary about the decline in critical thinking in “new generations.” In reality, “older generations” exhibit lack of critical thinking as well. We have seen glaring examples of the danger of insufficient critical thinking in people of all ages, and it’s especially important when people with decision making capacity don’t stop to evaluate the information they receive.
Lack of critical thinking was present and damaging last century, without internet influence. Scams are based on credulity, and there were plenty of scams happening back then. It gets worse, of course, when you’re presented with pictures and videos that are altered, created with AI or other tools, or misrepresented. But it’s not a new phenomenon. Our gullibility has several causes, some of which have to do with our educational systems, and others with our brain functioning not matching the world we live in.
The problem is that our gullibility can have catastrophic consequences. Below are some causes that lead to believing in multiple types of myths, many of which make people vulnerable to scams.
Not understanding chemistry or biology well enough.
A clear example is the “alkaline water and food is good for you” myth. pH facts are taught starting in middle school, so it’s astonishing that so many people don’t understand or remember the basics. The pH scale goes from 0 (extreme acidity, for example sulfuric acid/battery acid) to 14 (extreme alkalinity, for example drain cleaner). Both extremes can kill you if ingested. A pH of 7 is considered neutral, for example distilled water. Tap water can vary; according to the 2026 of the town where I live, the pH of the drinking water is 8.2. However, in many places , the vast majority of the liquids we drink tend to be acidic.
The vast majority of our food is acidic too. Despite some claims, there is no fruit with pH higher than 14 and if there was one, you would die if you ate it. Another argument is that it’s not the pH of the uneaten food, but the pH they create after we eat and metabolize it. Still false; human bodies have mechanisms to “buffer” pH, in order to keep it stable. As Dr. LeWine, Chief Medical Editor at Harvard Health Publishing mentions,
“Because the fluid in the stomach is so acidic, once regular or alkaline water gets down to your stomach there will be little difference in the resulting stomach fluid pH. You could potentially raise the stomach fluid pH by drinking a lot of alkaline water, but it would only be temporary. Even if you drank enough alkaline water to slightly raise the pH of your blood, your kidneys would quickly go into action to rebalance your blood pH.”
We need to have pH in specific ranges in different parts of our bodies; for example our stomach needs to remain very acidic (pH of 1.5-2) while our blood needs to be near neutral (7.35-7.45). Alkaline water is a scam; it does not lead to improved health. The benefits of an alkaline diet seem to be that you eat more fruits and vegetables, it should be obvious that eating fruits and veggies is better for you than eating potato chips.
Not understanding physics well enough.
The example that often comes to mind is not a scam but shows how gullible people can be. The video states that in a region in the Arctic the moon becomes huge and eclipses the sun on a daily basis. It’s still astonishing to me how many people close to me believed it, without questioning. Some questions they could have thought of include: why is the Moon a certain size? (actual size and distance from Earth) What are the effects of the Moon on Earth? (I’m thinking of gravity effects here) If there was a solar eclipse every single day somewhere on Earth, how come we don’t know about it? Why is only one person sharing this incredible phenomenon? This is the video that went viral and here is another explaining why it’s impossible to be true.
Believing perceived authorities and rumors or anecdotes over their lived reality.
This behavior is based on two logical fallacies, the “appeal to authority” and “anecdotal evidence” plus “appeals” to fear or emotion. And is possibly the behavior that annoys me the most. It was superbly portrayed in “Don’t look up,” where people believe politicians and media and didn’t believe their own eyes, even when a comet is literally heading to Earth. A review on The Guardian explains:
“Don’t Look Up is about two astronomers discovering that a Mount Everest-sized comet is due in six months’ time to hit planet Earth and wipe out all human life. The scientists urgently present their findings to the White House, but find that the political and media classes can’t or won’t grasp what they are saying: too stupefied with consumerism, short-termism and social-media gossip, and insidiously paralysed by the interests of big tech.”
The comet situation in Don’t look up was widely understood to represent climate change. Max Tegmark in Time magazine compares society’s view of the Don’t Look Up comet to our attitudes toward AI superintelligence.
A documentary about Hurricane Katrina shows how rumors intensified the vulnerability people were feeling; a man interviewed spoke about atrocities happening at the Superdome. On the other side of the Superdome, that is, because the interview took place at the Superdome. Only a minority of reports were true, and even those had been exaggerated. Panic spreads incredibly fast, and people in general don’t question the news or rumors, and don’t try to find out what the truth is. In the case of the Superdome, I keep thinking they could have, you know, walked to the other side to see if the terrible scenes they were hearing about were true.
We fall pray of psychological fallacies and cognitive biases
There are several psychological fallacies and cognitive biases that cause us to believe false information. The fallacies help us make decisions quickly in cases where we are endangered, but we allow them to dictate our life even when we have time to evaluate if it actually makes sense. Some of these fallacies lead to serious damage, including economic/financial scams and health impacts that can include the likelihood of death. The number of fallacies and biases is very large, and they are catalogued in different ways:
- Illusions of causality – believing that two (or more) unrelated phenomenons are connected. This includes certain beliefs that, for example, some neurotypes like autism and ADHD are caused by our environment or what the mother ate or the medicines the mother took while pregnant, or by vaccines or food dye. If people skip vaccinations or medications, their health will be endangered, and the stigma and bias against autistic people and ADHDers increases, which also puts us at risk of bullying, abuse and yes, death too.
- Confirmation bias – possibly the most spoken about. We believe what we want to believe, and it goes hand in hand with the illusions of causality. We only pay attention to the times where our expectations are met. In the case of autism, there is a coincidence in time: the social traits that are prevalent in autistic people become visible around the time that children receive some of the recommended vaccines. Autistic children show those traits, non-autistic children don’t. Conspiracy theorists focus on the autistic children and look for connections where there are none. Actually, a very large study actually showed a higher prevalence of autism in children who were *NOT* vaccinated (I have written about it and will link at another time).
- Salience bias. There are events or narratives that stick more with us, either because we are reading about them or watching reports or videos about them, they happened recently, they fit into our ideas (confirmation bias), and arise strong emotions in ourselves–here its good to consider that fear is a stronger emotion and will create more salience. Nowadays, pictures and video of the same event can be shared online and our brain may interpret them as separate events, giving us the idea that it happens more often than it does.
Biases and fallacies have been reviewed in multiple articles and they are too many to cover here. I’m linking two that seem good: This article speaks about the relationship between logical fallacies and critical thinking. And this one discusses the relationship between biases and public policy.
Why should we care?
I get it. People like me who tend to scrutinize information are annoying. I have to refrain myself from commenting on the vast majority of completely fake or misleading videos, pictures and statements I see online (or in person).
The problem is that many of those videos, pictures, statements can lead to panic, “us vs them” mentality, discrimination against one identity or the other, and much more.
Brexit was the result of the exploitation of the biases and fallacies normally present in the population, aided by very clever marketing tools and strategies. I remember that the same day of the Brexit vote, the most searched term on Google was “what is the European Union.” People voted based on emotion, biases and fallacies, dismissing logic and reflection. Many other critical aspects of public life have been similarly decided.
After reading what Jacob Coxon, former anthropic researcher, stated about superintelligence having the potential to eradicate humanity, I asked Copilot about it. Mainly, I didn’t understand how could superintelligence could kills us all. AI lives inside computers, after all, and doesn’t have a body in which to move around. And I cannot see it finding every last human and killing it. Copilot wrote that the body issue is solved with robotics.
It sounds to me like the biggest danger is really our lack of critical thinking. AI and in the future superintelligence are very persuasive and are treated as a trusted authority. How many people do you know that rely on AI for news and decision making? I know several. One of the points Copilot wrote in our conversation was:
“A superintelligence could potentially:
- Generate persuasive content at enormous scale
- Manipulate public opinion
- Create highly convincing misinformation
- Exploit psychological vulnerabilities”
All of these have happened before. Only, as Copilot explained, “AI could become better than humans at persuasion” in some situations. Three of the points Copilot mentioned are that AI can reach millions of people, remember vast amounts of information, use micro-advertising techniques (personalize messages). All of these has been used in the past, by humans, aided by pre-AI software and internet tools. In relation to personalized messages, Copilot mentions these could be used to scam people, recruitment by extremists groups, create fake relationships, convincing them to reveal information about themselves (and other people) that can be used against them.
But we don’t need AI or superintelligence to create havoc; as I discuss above, we do it ourselves and hurt individuals and populations based on our biases and the logical fallacies we believe in. We have the power to use critical thinking and evaluate what we are presented with to determine how true that information is, how often does an event really happen, realize that some actions are taken by one person, not a whole group of people, and much more.
Using critical thinking requires effort and we need to be intentionally, at least until it becomes a habit to question everything. It is important to embed critical thinking training starting very early in life, and schools have a crucial role to play, creating focused lessons and embedding critical thinking in their educational approaches.
Using critical thinking would improve our quality of life… and it may just save us all.
Florencia Ardon 