Training psychology students to think critically: Revisiting psychology as science / created by A Kagee

This article argues that South African psychology lecturers do not place sufficient emphasis in their teaching on critical thinking skills and on the application of these skills in the discipline of psychology. Students therefore often commit various errors in thinking such as hindsight bias, confirmation bias, the availability heuristic, the notion of “post hoc ergo propter hoc”, the idea that correlation equals causation, a reliance on an intuitive sense, reversed burden of proof, and over-reliance on testimonial and anecdotal evidence. Also, little emphasis is placed on scepticism, considering alternative explanations for phenomena, and demanding evidence for claims about human behaviour, creating conditions for unscientific and pseudoscientific beliefs to have credibility among psychology graduates. It is proposed that critical skills need to be taught in psychology courses, including rooting out gullibility and replacing it with skepticism, the principle of falsification, demanding evidence to support a claim, understanding the hierarchy of evidence, and engaging in probabilistic thinking