Critical & Creative Thinking Resources: Start Here

"Metacognition refers to the capacity to comprehend and manage one's own cognitive processes, enabling the recognition of biases and presumptions that might influence them...Increasing metacognitive abilities will improve critical-thinking abilities."

"While the term "critical thinking" appeared in more than half of the articles examined, there was a great variety in the way authors presented their meanings for this term as well as a great variety in those meanings themselves."

"...people who are better critical thinkers have the capacity to present alternative and opposing viewpoints in a coherent manner to provide understanding and new insights (intellectual empathy), distinguish what they know from what they do not know and are prepared to examine new evidence and arguments even if such examination leads to the discovery of flaws in their own beliefs (intellectual humility), think for themselves while adhering to rigorous standards for thought (intellectual autonomy), and are open to critique and can be moved by reasoning that is better than their own (confidence in reason)."

1. All-or-nothing thinking: You restrict possibilities and options to only two choices: yes or no (all or nothing).
2. Over generalization: You view a single, negative event as a continuing and neverending pattern of defeat.
3. Negative Mental filter: You dwell mostly on the negatives and generally ignore the positives.
4. Discounting the positives: You insist your achievements or positive efforts do not count.
5. Jumping to conclusions:
A. Mind-reading: You assume that people are reacting negatively to you without any objective evidence.
B. Fortune-Telling: You predict that things will turn out badly without any objective evidence.
6. Magnification or minimization: You blow things way out of proportion or minimize their importance.
7. Emotional reasoning: You base your reasoning from your feelings: "I feel like a loser, so I must be one."
8. "Should/must guilting: You criticize yourself or other people with "musts," "shoulds," "oughts," and "have tos."
9. Labeling: Instead of saying "I made a mistake," you tell yourself "I'm an idiot" or "I'm a loser."
10. Personalization: You blame yourself almost completely for something for which you were not entirely responsible.