What is critical thinking?

There seems to be an emerging appreciation of the skills anthropologists and other humanities/ social science types can bring to contemporary environments (examples here and here), especially those that involve complex business problems, innovation, social issues and increasing use of technology (such as self-driving cars, artificial intelligence and machine learning). Anthropologists are great critical thinkers – we are trained to look at things from multiple perspectives, break challenging concepts down to analyse the different components, and be aware of how our biases and experiences inform the meanings and conclusions we make. Here are a couple of short videos that explain what critical thinking skills are.

This video from Macat (an online education provider partnered with the University of Cambridge) defines critical thinking as asking the right questions to identify the meaning and significance of claims and arguments. This video from TEDEd breaks down critical thinking into 5 parts (picture below).

For more thoughts on how anthropologists think, you might like this post on liminal thinking.