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In this article, the authors argue that there are a range of effects usually studied within cognitive psychology that are legitimately thought of as aspects of critical thinking: the cognitive biases studied in the heuristics and biases literature. In a study of 793 student participants, the authors found that the ability to avoid these biases was moderately correlated with a more traditional laboratory measure of critical thinking--the ability to reason logically when logic conflicts with prior belief. The correlation between these two classes of critical thinking skills was not due to a joint connection with general cognitive ability because it remained statistically significant after the variance due to cognitive ability was partialed out. Measures of thinking dispositions (actively open-minded thinking and need for cognition) predicted unique variance in both classes of critical thinking skills after general cognitive ability had been controlled. Keywords: critical thinking, heuristics and biases, intelligence, thinking dispositions

The domain specificity and generality of an important critical thinking skill was examined by administering 9 reasoning and decision-making tasks to 125 adults. Optimal performance on all of the tasks required that disjunctive processing strategies--strategies requiring the exhaustive consideration of all of the possible states of the world--be adopted. Performance across these disjunctive reasoning tasks displayed considerable domain specificity, but 5 of the tasks displayed moderate convergence. Cognitive ability was associated with performance on only 3 of 9 tasks. Six of the 9 tasks displayed associations with 1 of 2 cognitive styles that were examined in the multivariate task battery (need for cognition and reflectivity). Performance on the 5 tasks that displayed some domain generality was also more associated with thinking styles than with cognitive ability in several regression analyses.

In 4 experiments, the relationships among critical reasoning, personal goals, general intellectual ability, and information-processing style were explored. Three critical reasoning competencies were investigated: the law of large numbers, the intuitive analysis of covariance, and the ability to detect flaws in experimental designs. Participants were presented problems that involved goal-enhancing, goal-neutral, and goal-threatening evidence. There were 2 main findings: (a) Although general ability predicted 2 components of critical reasoning, biases in reasoning were better predicted by information processing style (i.e., rational vs. intuitive). (b) Reasoning on the goal-enhancing and neutral problems was less sophisticated than reasoning on threatening problems. Depth of processing seems to be a primary mechanism underlying motivated reasoning. In addition, information processing style is an individual difference variable that moderates the extent of reasoning biases. Similar results were obtained across different forms of critical thinking.