What Is Critical Thinking? Skills and Examples

Critical thinking is careful, purposeful judgment about what to believe or do. The best-known definition comes from a panel of 46 experts convened for the American Philosophical Association. They described it as “purposeful, self-regulatory judgment” that produces interpretation, analysis, evaluation and inference, along with an explanation of the evidence and reasoning behind that judgment (Facione, 1990). In plain terms, you look closely at claims and reasons, your own included, before deciding. “Critical” here means questioning, not fault-finding (University of Sydney).

Where the standard definition comes from

In December 1987, the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on Pre-College Philosophy asked Peter Facione to look into critical thinking and how it is assessed (Facione, 1990). He used the Delphi method. Experts answered several rounds of questions, read each other’s reasoning and revised their views. About half the 46 panelists worked mainly in philosophy, and the rest came from education, the social sciences and the physical sciences (same source). The 1990 report, usually called the Delphi Report, describes critical thinking along two dimensions: cognitive skills and dispositions.

Researchers still use this definition. A 2015 meta-analysis of critical thinking instruction opens its abstract with it (Abrami et al., 2015).

Other researchers put the emphasis in different places:

• Psychologist Diane Halpern defines critical thinking as using skills and strategies on purpose to make a good outcome more likely (Halpern, 1998).
• Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham offers a commonsense test. Your thinking is critical when it is novel (not just recalled from a past situation), self-directed (not just following someone’s instructions) and effective, meaning it follows norms like considering both sides and offering evidence for claims (Willingham, 2019).

These definitions overlap more than they conflict. All three describe deliberate reasoning that aims at a sound conclusion.

The six core skills

The Delphi panel agreed on six core skills, each with its own sub-skills (Facione, 1990):

Skill	What it means, in short	Sub-skills
Interpretation	Understanding and expressing what experiences, data, events, rules or beliefs mean	Categorization, decoding significance, clarifying meaning
Analysis	Working out how statements, questions and ideas are meant to support one another	Examining ideas, identifying arguments, analyzing arguments
Evaluation	Judging how credible a claim is and how well the reasoning holds up	Assessing claims, assessing arguments
Inference	Gathering what you need to draw reasonable conclusions, forming hypotheses and working out what follows	Querying evidence, conjecturing alternatives, drawing conclusions
Explanation	Stating your results, justifying how you got there and presenting your reasoning as clear arguments	Stating results, justifying procedures, presenting arguments
Self-regulation	Monitoring your own reasoning and correcting it where needed	Self-examination, self-correction

Self-regulation means turning analysis and evaluation on your own reasoning. The panel’s examples include checking your views on a controversial issue for the influence of personal bias or self-interest, and rereading sources to make sure you haven’t missed something important (same source).

Evaluation is where named mistakes in reasoning come in. Our list of logical fallacies covers the common ones, and our guide to deductive vs. inductive reasoning explains the two main ways conclusions follow from evidence.

The dispositions behind it

The panel didn’t think skills were enough. Members broadly agreed that good critical thinkers have a “critical spirit”: a probing curiosity and an eagerness for reliable information that weaker critical thinkers seem to lack (Facione, 1990). A consensus of 83% agreed that good critical thinkers show the dispositions below. A smaller majority, 61%, counted them as part of the meaning of critical thinking itself (same source).

Toward life in general, the list includes:

• Curiosity about a wide range of issues, and a concern to stay well-informed
• Trust in reasoned inquiry, and confidence in your own ability to reason
• Open-mindedness toward different worldviews, and flexibility about alternatives
• Fair-mindedness in judging reasoning, and understanding of other people’s opinions
• Honesty about your own biases, prejudices and stereotypes
• Prudence in suspending, making or changing judgments
• Willingness to reconsider when honest reflection says you should

Toward a specific question, it includes clarity about what’s being asked, order when things get complex, diligence in finding relevant information and persistence when it gets hard (same source).

The panel explained why this matters. People who have these dispositions are much more likely to use their skills in personal and civic life than people who have the skills but aren’t inclined to use them (same source). Willingham makes a related point: much critical thinking comes down to deciding to think when others wouldn’t. That appetite seems to be partly a matter of personality, and there’s limited research on whether it can be taught (Willingham, 2019).

Examples in everyday decisions

Most critical thinking happens in ordinary moments:

• Willingham gives the example of a café where hot water and an extra espresso shot, ordered separately, cost far less than a long black. A customer who notices could order those two items instead. The arithmetic is easy, and what’s unusual is deciding to do it (Willingham, 2019).
• People readily accept that you need many dice rolls to tell whether dice are loaded. Yet they will call someone “bad at math” after two poor test results, or judge a person’s friendliness from one brief meeting (same source). Noticing that two tests is a small sample takes evaluation and inference.
• Willingham recalls his middle-schooler mistaking an op-ed for a news report on social media, even though she had studied text genres at school (same source). For more on this, see our guide on how to evaluate sources.
• The Delphi experts said critical thinking skills are useful in almost every area of life, from defending clients to helping a friend figure out what might be wrong with his car (Facione, 1990).

Critical thinking vs. just being skeptical

Doubt is one part of critical thinking. Here’s how skepticism on its own compares:

	Skepticism alone	Critical thinking
Goal	Find reasons to doubt	Reach the best-supported judgment, which may mean agreeing
Where it points	Usually at claims you dislike	At every claim, including your own
End point	Rejection or suspended judgment	A conclusion you can explain and would revise

The Delphi skills end in drawing conclusions and explaining them, and the dispositions include trust in reasoned inquiry and prudence in making, not just suspending, judgments (Facione, 1990).

Doubt also tends to be selective. In one set of experiments, people self-administered a fake medical test. Those who got an unfavorable result took longer to accept it, and were more likely to recheck it, than those who got a favorable one (Ditto et al., 2003). People also see biases more easily in others than in themselves (Pronin et al., 2004). That gap shows up across many classic cognitive biases, and higher cognitive ability doesn’t shrink it (West et al., 2012). Doubt aimed only at unwelcome information ends up protecting what you already believe, a pattern our guide to confirmation bias covers in more detail.

The Delphi experts saw this risk. Some warned that stressing skills over dispositions could leave students “close-minded, intellectually inflexible and dogmatic” (Facione, 1990).

If you want to get better at all of this, our guide on how to improve critical thinking covers what the research says works.