Critical thinking can save your life, especially during a pandemic of pathogens, disinformation and misinformation. While we are not in a pandemic as this is being written, it is a question of when the next one will arrive. As our government is likely to be unwilling and unable to help us, we need to prepare to face it on our own. Hence, this series on applying critical thinking to pandemics.
Laying aside academic jargon, critical thinking is the rational assessment of a claim to determine whether you should accept it as probably true, reject it as probably false or suspend judgment. People often forget they can suspend judgment but in the face of misinformation and disinformation this is sometimes the best option.
Suppose you saw a Facebook post that drinking alcohol will protect you from a viral disease, you saw a tweet about how gargling with bleach can kill viruses, or you heard President Trump extoling the virtues of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID. How can you rationally assess these claims if you are not a medical expert? Fortunately, critical thinking can help even those whose medical knowledge is limited to what they saw on Grey’s Anatomy.
When a claim is worth assessing, the first step is to see if you can check it against your own observations and see if it fits them. If it does not, then this is a mark against it. If it does, that is a plus. Take the bleach claim as an example. If you look at a bottle of bleach you will see the safety warnings. While it will probably kill viruses, it is dangerous to gargle it. So, it would be best to reject the claim that you should gargle bleach. While your own observations are a good check on claims, they are not infallible and it is wise to critically consider their reliability.
The second step, which usually happens automatically, is to test the claim against your background information. Your background information is all the stuff you have learned over the years. When you get a claim, you match it up against your background information to get a rough assessment of its initial plausibility. This is how likely it seems to be true upon first consideration. The plausibility will be adjusted should you investigate more. As an example, consider the claim about alcohol’s effect on viruses. On the one hand, you probably know alcohol can sterilize things and this raises the plausibility of the claim. But you probably have not heard of people protecting themselves successfully from the flu or cold (which are caused by viruses) by drinking alcohol. Also, you probably have in your background information that the alcohol used to sterilize is poisonous and differs from, for example, whiskey. So, it would be unwise to believe that drinking alcohol is a good way to protect oneself from viruses.
One major problem here is that everyone’s background information is full of false beliefs. I know, from experience, that I have had many false beliefs and infer that I still do. I do not know which ones are false, if I did, I would stop believing them. Because of our fallibility, this method has a serious flaw: we could accept or reject a claim because of a false belief. This is why it is a good idea to assess our beliefs. We can only be rationally confident of our assessment of a claim to the degree that our background information is likely to be correct. The more you know, the better you will be at making such assessments.
While having false beliefs can cause errors, people are also affected by biases and fallacies. Since there is a multitude of both, I will only briefly discuss a few that are relevant during a pandemic. People tend to be biased in favor of their group, be it their religion, political party or sports team. Bias inclines people to believe claims made by members of their group, which fuels the group think fallacy: believing a claim is true because you are proud of your group and someone in your group made it. This can also be a version of the appeal to belief fallacy in which one believes claim is true because their group believes that it is true. While pandemics cross party lines, the last pandemic was politicized. Because of this, people with strong partisanship often believe what their side says and disbelieve the other side. But believing based on group membership is bad logic and can get you killed. As such, making rational assessments in a pandemic (or anytime) requires fighting biases and considering claims as objectively as possible. This is a hard thing to do, but it can save your life.
As pandemics are terrifying and people want to have hope, it is wise to be on guard against appeal to fear (scare tactics) and wishful thinking. An appeal to fear occurs when a claim is accepted as true because of fear rather than based on evidence or reasons. For example, if someone believes that migrants are criminals because a news channel made them afraid of migrants, they have fallen for scare tactics.
It needs to be noted that something that is frightening can also serve as evidence. To illustrate, Ebola is scary because it can kill you. So, reasoning that because it is deadly, you should avoid it is good logic. While emotions affect belief, they are logically neutral whether the feeling is fear or hope.
Wishful thinking is a classic fallacy in which a person believes a claim because they want it to be true (or reject one because they want it to be false). When a pandemic is taking place, it is natural for people to engage in wishful thinking—to believe claims because they want them to be true. For example, a person might think that they will not get sick based on wishful thinking, which can be very dangerous to themselves and others. As another example, someone might believe drinking alcohol will protect them from COVID because they want it to be true; but this is not true. The defense against wishful thinking is not to give up all hope, but to avoid taking hope as evidence. This can be hard to do—objectively considering claims during a pandemic can be depressing. But wishful thinking can get you and others killed. In the next essay, I will discuss how to assess experts and alleged experts.