Paul C. Smith & Kris Vasquez
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At first glance, these two situations may seem to have little in common, as they involve
different subject matter, and one involves questions about normal events whereas the other
invokes supernatural powers. However, the two situations have an important common
element: In each case the student refers to personal experience as support for her belief.
In her examination of students’ understanding of the purpose of classroom discussion,
Trosset (1998) found a “bias in favor of personalized knowledge (as opposed to knowledge
accessible to all comers, such as that contained in scholarly writings)” (p. 47). This bias
often interferes with students’ critical thinking skills in the situations in which we, as
faculty, most hope to see those skills applied.
When a student cites personal experiences as support for false beliefs, instructors face
a particularly awkward situation, one in which they must balance the need to model open-
mindedness about psychological claims with appropriate skepticism about unsupported
counterclaims. Of course, it is possible that the student citing personal experience is right
and the textbook is wrong, but as anecdotes about personal experiences lack the controls
found in even the most basic research, they are only very rarely valid reasons to even sus-
pect that to be the case. Unfortunately, although psychology teachers may be aware of the
severe limitations of personal experience as a source of knowledge, students and the lay
public generally are not. It is more common to assume that personal experience is a
uniquely powerful source of knowledge, one that trumps research and renders critical
thinking irrelevant.
Conditionalizing Critical Thinking
Why would students who had developed effective critical thinking skills fail to apply those
skills to their personal experience-based beliefs? The failure to apply even well-learned skills is
not unusual, and the ability to apply skills and knowledge in appropriate situations is an
important factor distinguishing experts from novices in a field (Glaser, 1992; National
Research Council, 1999). A student’s knowledge is said to be properly “conditionalized” when
the student routinely applies that knowledge in the appropriate situations (National Research
Council, 1999, p. 31). Unfortunately, the demands of formal education tend to teach stu-
dents inappropriate methods of conditionalizing their knowledge. When students learning
mathematics, for example, learn a new procedure, they may safely assume that they are to use
that procedure to solve the homework problems assigned that day. The standard practice of
assigning problems related to the day’s lesson relieves students of the need to decide whether
the newly learned procedure applies to a particular problem. Similarly, the teaching of critical
thinking and of psychological research skills may lead students astray in establishing the con-
ditions in which those skills are to be applied. For example, if a teacher focuses exclusively on
critiques of media presentations to teach and assess students’ critical thinking skills, the stu-
dents may quite reasonably learn to apply those skills only to media reports. Alternatively, if
the examples focus on claims made as a result of motivated biases (e.g., advertisements or
intentional scams), the student may learn to think critically only about claims for which a
motive for deceit is apparent and to uncritically accept sincere claims.
In general, we can expect that students will learn to apply their critical thinking skills in
the contexts in which they learned and practiced those skills. Our main concern is that if