I think a lot about critical thinking. I feel like a lot of people pride themselves on being critical thinkers (I do too.) And there’s a lot of talk about why critical thinking is important, but there’s also this weird tendency for people to just confuse contrarian thinking with critical thinking.
When we are given constant access to information and ideas, it’s hard for us to process the context of the data we consume and reconcile it with our knowledge of the world. The sheer volume and frequency of the media and information that we process daily makes it difficult to comprehend and contemplate all of the things we experience and learn on a meaningful level. We are also increasingly aware of the immediacy of our social interactions as they are facilitated by advances in media and communicative technology but I don’t think we appreciate how much this has affected our ability to think.
It fascinates me that the notion of critical thought has come to represent any idea challenging power dynamics and the status quo more than analyzing evidence and understanding how observations form arguments and judgments. I love skepticism, but it seems like skeptical thinking has become the driving force behind many speculative theories and collective illusions. Even worse, I feel like people are beginning to give more weight to skeptical arguments just because they oppose what’s perceived as mainstream or normative.
Consider how many times a day someone says something to you that is purely speculation and presents it as fact. It can be something trivial like “I hate Taylor Swift, she’s a sellout and poser,” or something dangerously untruthful like “You shouldn't trust shots, mRNA vaccines are not safe.” Both of these statements are biased opinions based on verifiable assumptions.
It's important to recognize the difference between opinions and facts in our daily interactions. While opinions are personal beliefs or views, facts are based on evidence and can be proven true or false. It's a crucial part of our critical thinking abilities to question and verify information before accepting it as fact. But we also need to be able to recognize why we find something credible or not and why we feel compelled to reject or rely on consensus. Understanding how we validate our beliefs through social consensus and how we analyze and determine credibility are equally important critical thinking abilities.
Think about how easy it is for someone to despise something popular like Taylor Swift’s music simply because everyone else likes it or because it’s different from their preferred genres. Think about how that deviant behavior can extend from Taylor’s music to a perception of her identity and a generalization of her fanbase. You can have never met or spoken to Taylor Swift, have never known anyone else who is close to her, have never watched a documentary about her or read a book or article about her career and still feel completely justified in judging her based on your interpretation of how other people perceive her. As a self-proclaimed critical thinker, you may rationalize this as avoiding groupthink and peer pressure dynamics, but if your conception of Taylor has no basis of your own observations or dispositions, then you're just seeking confirmation bias to reinforce preconceived notions.
This is not thinking critically. This is a negative feedback loop in the guise of nonconformity. Today, the boundaries of normative pressures are more difficult to define and easier to manipulate. While contemporary culture (neoliberal stoicism) has certainly embraced intentional deviance from normative values and behaviors, normative conformity and informational conformity are both equally important parts of our social culture. Informational conformity is concerned with the accuracy and validity of perceived information about reality. Think scientific method, prevailing theories of knowledge, and social consensus.
Traditionally, individuals have mostly been rewarded for behaving in accordance with the opinions of the majority. Going against the group was often unpleasant or conflicting whereas going with the group was more acceptable. As our historical accounts began to focus more on individuality and revolutionary movements and ideas, I believe that our collective value in conformity has evolved. In our pursuit for individual achievement, we’ve systematically altered our responses to normative and informational conformity as the probabilistic nature of our neural mechanisms have begun to prioritize subjective perception over potential reference from informational or normative influences. Simultaneously, our need for personal validation through social interactions conflicts with the self-reliant narrative and this leads to polarization and the de-humanization of groups we see as ‘others’, which gives us more reason to seek and embrace nonconformity.
The question of whether or not you enjoy Taylor Swift as an artist is an instrumental problem. At the end of the dilemma, you either like her or you don’t. If your entire opinion of her and her music come from blatant deviance through in-group biases and echo chambers, and those are the only viewpoints of her that you’re exposed to, then that’s how you’ll likely align yourself. But you still have the option to listen to her music, maybe go to one of her concerts, or read a biography and learn a little more about who she is. You can try engaging with ‘Swifties’ or known Taylor fans, and attempt to gain a real understanding of what they value in her lyrics and performances, and possibly be able to formulate an opinion based on your knowledge and observations. In this way, informational conformity can help you understand normative conformity. If you like her music, great. If not, at least you can recognize that the judgement is based on your own rationality and perhaps withhold judgments about her personally as you come to understand that the representations of her in media don’t necessarily reflect who she is. This is the beauty of critical thinking abilities.
The argument regarding the safety of mRNA vaccines is more of an intrinsic issue. Although, it may first appear to be a solution as simple as ‘research mRNA and listen to science’, the actual issue is the problem, which is not “I don’t understand the science behind mRNA and vaccines,” it is a much deeper issue at play here, the problem of what it means to be free in a political sense. The person rejecting the validity of vaccinations or epidemiologists is skeptical of the roles of both normative and informational conformity. In this sense, researching articles or books about the science and biological processes of mRNA is not going to resolve their skepticism and being told to trust these sources is only going to further promote their adherence to nonconformity. In order to even get the vaccine issue on the table we have to uncover the context of the intrinsic political problem of freedom, which asks are individuals free when they are unencumbered by government interference or is government support a necessary precondition to be free? Regardless of how an individual solves this problem, it is likely to have a significant influence on their life.
Consider you help this person get past the problem of political freedom and they begin to understand how they may be de-individualizing the work of doctors and biochemists. Maybe they gradually become open to different sources of information, like a book about protein replacement theory, or a visit a medical institute to learn more about immunology. You could even show them a documentary about the life of Hungarian-American biochemist, Kati Kariko, and maybe they can begin to differentiate judgements based on group characteristics (no longer blaming ‘they/them’ as generalized establishments, i.e. medical professionals, big pharma, or government cronies, etc.,) and start appreciating the real work and energy being done at the individual level. Depending on the solution, this kind of thinking can dramatically change an individual’s conception of self and way of being in the world. Again, the beauty of critical thinking abilities.
This is all to say that I don’t think people are wrong or stupid for embracing nonconformity. There is plenty of research and historical evidence that emphasizes the power in principles of nonconformity. Look at Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, Ghandi, Malcom X, Malala, etc. But I do believe that many new digital platforms have become echo chambers that benefit from the spread of online misinformation and the rapid flow of media and content incentivizes believing in false narratives and unchecked rumors. In the digital economy, nonconformity sells.
As technology continues to advance, the need for critical thinking skills is only going to increase. If you find yourself incredibly skeptical of professionally accredited policymakers or predictive LLMs trained on vast amounts of public data and information but also seem to willingly accept or believe in representations from random strangers’ opinions or stated facts in posted memes on Reddit or Instagram Reels, perhaps it’s time to reconsider your standards of adequacy and accuracy.
Remember, it is not just the credibility of the source of the information that matters, but the context of the content and how it is framed. You can cultivate the ability to pause and think before making up your mind or immediately jumping to conclusions, to weigh judgements based on supporting evidence and reasoning and to refrain from unquestioned acceptance of ideological and algorithmic-based perspectives. We need to maintain a healthy balance between self-reflection and open-mindedness to understand, appreciate and live the democratic way of life characteristic of the professed ‘American Dream.’