Critical Thinking — Beyond Basics, a conversation with Dr. Christopher Dwyer

In a recent MindTricks Radio conversation with critical thinking researcher Dr. Christopher Dwyer, we kept returning to a deceptively simple question: what does it actually mean to know something? His new book title, Knowledge Doesn’t Exist, is intentionally provocative, not as a nihilistic claim that nothing is real, but as a challenge to how casually we treat “knowledge” as something solid and owned. In everyday life, much of what we call knowledge is information we absorbed, interpreted, and stored, often without checking whether it was accurate, complete, or fully understood. The uncomfortable realization is that knowledge behaves less like a fixed object and more like a working draft, shaped by context, gaps, and assumptions we rarely notice.

That idea becomes even more interesting once memory enters the picture. Memory does not function like a recording device; it functions like a storyteller. When details are missing, especially in emotionally charged situations, the mind does not leave blank space. It fills in the narrative so the story feels coherent. During our discussion, we explored how even vivid and confidently held memories can be subtly inaccurate because the brain prioritizes meaning over precision. The real-world implication is significant: if our internal evidence is fallible, then intellectual honesty becomes a skill rather than a personality trait. The most reliable thinkers are not the most certain ones, but the ones willing to pause, verify, and admit uncertainty.

We also touched on the perception of time, a topic that quietly reveals how deeply cognition shapes reality. Time feels slower in childhood and faster in adulthood, not because time itself changes, but because novelty does. Children are flooded with new experiences, giving each moment weight and texture. Adults, by contrast, move through familiar routines with little cognitive friction, causing weeks and months to blur together. As we discussed, slowing time is less about controlling the clock and more about reintroducing novelty, attention, and presence into daily life. When experience becomes meaningful again, time regains its depth.

From there, the conversation naturally moved to the modern information ecosystem and the internet’s outsized role in shaping belief. The problem is not simply that misinformation exists. It is that many people never learn what a trustworthy source actually looks like. They stop at familiarity, mistake repetition for credibility, and then get quietly guided by algorithms designed to maximize engagement rather than accuracy. We talked about the difference between using the internet as a research tool, where you work backward toward evidence and methodology, versus using it as a shortcut to certainty. Even credible research requires scrutiny, since funding sources, ideological leanings, and methodological choices all influence what conclusions look like on paper.

One of the more refreshing parts of the conversation challenged the assumption that critical thinking and creativity are opposites. In reality, creativity without evaluation often becomes self-indulgent, while evaluation without creativity turns sterile and rigid. Meaningful creativity usually involves both: generating ideas freely and then testing them against constraints and real-world usefulness. Intuition fits this pattern as well. It is evolutionarily efficient and often helpful for low-stakes decisions, but it becomes unreliable when treated as an authority in high-stakes situations.

We ended in a surprisingly hopeful place. Uncertainty is not a flaw in human thinking or in science; it is the condition that makes improvement possible. Science advances by refining, falsifying, and updating its models, not by delivering final truths. On a personal level, the goal is not to become paralyzed by doubt, but to develop a healthier relationship with what we think we know. As our conversation underscored, critical thinking is not about winning arguments or sounding smart. It is about learning to live comfortably with uncertainty while still making thoughtful, well-reasoned decisions.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Kaplan: Chris, welcome back. It’s great to see you.

Dr. Dwyer: Thanks very much, Aaron. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Kaplan: I had you on—probably around 2022, sort of at the tail end of the pandemic—and we had a really fun conversation about critical thinking and cognitive biases. I think you taught me all about the Dunning–Kruger effect and some cost fallacy and a bunch of that kind of stuff. That was a very popular episode. I was really excited to have you come on and talk more about critical thinking and some of the things around that.

Dr. Dwyer: Yeah, it was a great chat. I’m happy to be back, and I’ll always talk about critical thinking. I’m delighted [to have] the opportunity.

Dr. Kaplan: You’ve been a busy man. You have written a new book since then. It’s called Knowledge Doesn’t Exist and Other Thoughts on Critical Thinking. I’d be really interested to hear a little bit about that before we dig into our conversation today.

I also wanted to thank you. I know it’s late in Ireland. We almost have opposite ends of the time zones here. It’s early in the morning in Hawaii. It’s in the evening [for you], and you have a family. Thank you so much for making time for me here.

Tell me about this book, Chris—this new book that you’ve published.

Dr. Dwyer: Yeah, so Knowledge Doesn’t Exist—it’s one of those weird titles that’s slightly provocative, and I guess purposefully so. If you look at the book, I think the book cover is telling in that way too because it’s just a fish on there. There’s a certain ambiguity of why a fish—especially a critical thinking book. You’d imagine there’d be a light bulb or Rodin’s Thinker or something like that.

I guess it requires you to know a little something about fish. That fish is a salmon. It also requires you to know a little bit about Irish mythology. We have a story about the salmon of knowledge.

Then another thing about the cover is that it’s only a fish on a blue background. You might interpret that background as the water, or you might interpret it as a table with a blue tablecloth. Salmon has significant implications for that salmon because if it’s in the water, you could assume that it’s alive and well. If it’s on a table, it probably isn’t. In a way, it’s almost like Schrödinger’s salmon. Is it alive? Is it dead?

When I’m playing with the idea of the imagery and all that, I brought back this sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus where John Cleese is talking about this parrot and it’s dead, and he whacks it off the table and he says, “This parrot has ceased to be.” If it ceases to be—if it’s dead—then it doesn’t exist.

It’s this metaphor, I guess—this symbolism—that this fish, the salmon of knowledge: is it dead or is it alive? Does it exist or does it not? That’s what I’m getting at.

I guess there’s a little… it’s a very niche joke, or whatever you want to call it—a very inside joke, I guess—in the sense that everything I said to you up until this point requires you to know a lot of things about a lot of things. If you don’t know those things, you’re not going to get the joke. That’s the point.

A lot of times, we don’t know what we don’t know. If we treat life like that, and treat information and knowledge like that, we’ll start to consider: does knowledge actually exist? Am I knowledgeable? Do I have knowledge? How can I know? What do I know? “I know nothing,” in a very kind of Socratic kind of way.

That’s the starting point in terms of what the book is. It requires you to think about knowledge.

I guess I was trying to write a book about epistemology and epistemological understanding. But I think if you say those words or those phrases to a person on the street—who doesn’t research this stuff on a daily basis—they’ll look at you like you have three heads on.

What I wanted to do was take this idea of epistemology and make it sexy for the larger population and help people get to know what knowledge is all about—what it really means to know something—and how we can use that in our thinking.

My first book was very much on what critical thinking is, what it consists of, how we should do it. This book kind of goes into a more real-world scenario: everyday settings in which we kind of account for the idea that we don’t know everything.

Maybe we’ve got some training in critical thinking. Maybe we’ve never heard [of] critical thinking before. But what can I do with the knowledge that I have and apply that in a way where I’ll see benefits in my decision making? What can I look out for? What should I think about in terms of applying my knowledge even though I have no real background in critical thinking at all?

Dr. Kaplan: Very cool. Real briefly, Chris—give us a definition of epistemology. How do you define that exactly?

Dr. Dwyer: Yeah, that’s a tough one because I think a lot of people will give you very different ways of looking at it.

I typically look at it as: any word you have with “-ology” at the end—it’s the study of. We’ll always say it’s the study of knowledge. But I think a better way of putting it is: the understanding of the nature and limits of knowledge.

The idea is that I know that my name is Chris Dwyer, and it probably always will be Chris Dwyer, but I can’t see into the future. I can’t be sure that that will always be the case. Why do I say that? When could that ever change?

If I found out 15 years down the line that I was adopted, or we have hit a new social construct where marriages now—instead of the woman changing her last name—it’ll be the husband changing the last name… you don’t know when I might cease to be Chris Dwyer. Or even the day of my death—have I stopped being Chris Dwyer? Well, there is no longer that person who is… there was a Chris Dwyer, so by definition there is no longer.

It all depends on how you conceptualize it. People conceptualize things very differently, and based on how they conceptualize it, it’s a different piece of knowledge.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, really fascinating. I have to admit: after hearing your discussion about even the thought behind the image on the cover of your book, I’m really impressed with that.

I have to admit I was really just thinking [not] much beyond the thought when I saw the fish. It kind of ended there. Now I see how deep the thought is in terms of how you could interpret that and the perception of it. That’s really cool.

Dr. Dwyer: It’s as well—it’s provocative, and I want it to be provocative because I want people to think, “What’s this guy talking about?”

I want some people to go, “This guy’s an idiot. What is he talking about?” It’s almost like rage bait—where they need to buy this book, read it, and see how much of an idiot I am—and then kind of go, “Oh, he made some good points. I’m glad I picked up this book.”

Or alternatively, people will know what I’m getting at and just kind of look at epistemology from a critical thinking standpoint.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, well, I’m going to give you some rage bait moments in this interview because rather than just sort of having a dry approach here, I’m going to throw some pretty provocative questions at you that I think are stemmed directly from the book, actually.

So I’m curious to hear how you sort of squirm out of it and give me some good explanations this time. I’m sure you will. So I’m really excited to get into that.

To begin with though, just as a really brief primer, tell us a little bit about critical thinking. What do you mean first off—just as a baseline—what is critical thinking?

Dr. Dwyer: Yeah, great question. One of the most commonly misinterpreted takes on critical thinking in higher-order cognition is critical thinking.

First and foremost—and it’s only something that I’ve kind of noticed recently—this misinterpretation: it is good thinking. People will say, “Oh, well, it’s good thinking with beneficial outcomes and decision making.” Yes, that’s all true. But why “critical”? Why not just good thinking?

It’s not “critical” in terms of critique. A lot of people get that wrong. I’ve noticed recently they’re like, “Well, it’s about critiquing.” It’s not. It’s critical because it’s important. And there’s a big difference there.

I will always tell people that they should only apply critical thinking in situations where the decision is important to them because it is effortful. It does take time. And if you don’t want to put in the effort and you don’t have the time to do it, you’re probably not going to yield a decision that is on the same level as one that would be achieved through critical thinking.

Now, what do I actually mean by it? I can give you a long definition—I won’t bother. What I’ll tell you is that there are three core parts of critical thinking.

There’s a series of skills that need to be used. One needs to have the right disposition towards critical thinking—so you need to be inclined to do certain things, inclined to think in certain ways. And you need to be motivated to do it.

And then the third part of it is something called reflective judgment—and that’s where your epistemology comes in. You need to be willing to not jump to a conclusion and take a step back and say, “Whoa, this is a heavy topic here. Let me think about this for a minute.”

What do I know? What do I feel? And can I differentiate the knowing from the feeling and the believing? And what are the differences? What do I want to be the right answer versus what really is the right answer?

So being able to kind of account for all of those variables that might be impacting you while you’re trying to make a decision—that’s that reflective judgment.

But when it comes down to the skills, the things that they will teach you in a critical thinking course: you’re going to learn how to analyze. You’re going to learn how to evaluate. And you’re going to learn to infer information from a variety of arguments and sources and what have you.

All the skills—they can be taught. It’s that reflective judgment and that disposition towards critical thinking that needs to develop over time.

Dr. Kaplan: I actually remember in our previous interview, I did with you—we dug into that pretty deeply, looking at those three aspects of critical thinking. So I’d really encourage listeners: if you want to hear a deeper dive onto that, go back and listen to the previous episode with Chris. It’s fantastic.

But that’s, I think, a great explanation. And I’m glad it’s not too simple because obviously this is a complicated subject and we want to make sure we’re being precise with this.

Now getting into your book, let’s just start with this provocative chapter you have titled “Knowledge Doesn’t Exist.” Walk me through this, Chris. What do you mean by “knowledge doesn’t exist”?

Dr. Dwyer: We know that there’s something called information. And information is something that we typically take on from a cognitive psychology standpoint. We attend to it. We try to comprehend it. We encode it in memory. We’ll play with it in working memory for as long as we need it.

And if it turns out we don’t need it terribly long, we’re not going to worry about it at all and we’ll likely forget it. If it turns out that it’s of benefit or we need to remember it, we’ll encode [it] at a deeper level—maybe to long-term memory—and we’ll store it there in long-term memory. And that’ll be just information we have.

But as we have that stored there, that’s what we treat as knowledge. But there’s a lot of assumptions going on in terms of whether that knowledge is correct or not—how that information got there. There is no prereq for whether it came from a credible source. How we initially felt about it will impact how it is encoded.

Over time we have a tendency to forget. Even if we know something…

There’s a very interesting little handbook on debunking by Cook and Lewandowsky, and they talk about this concept that if we learn information and we’re told as we’re learning the information that it’s incorrect, over time we’ll actually forget that caveat—that it’s incorrect—and we’ll still hold on to that information. And we might later use that information as if it were fact down the road.

So the point I guess that I’m trying to make is that we have a way of looking at knowledge as it must be true. Why would we store it if it wasn’t true? And the unfortunate thing is that’s not always the case.

You might explain something very complex to me, and I’ll nod along and go, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.” And I’ll form a schema for that information. I’ll organize something into my cognitive architecture about what you’ve explained to me.

And if you would ask me two weeks from now, did I understand it? I’d say, “Yeah, absolutely. I probably need a little bit more information. I probably need to do another lesson on it.” And I could be cautious about it. But the fact is that I’m making a lot of assumptions about how well I understood you.

And if I get one or two things wrong in that understanding, that kind of has a big impact on that “knowledge.” It’s incomplete knowledge. It’s misinformed knowledge.

But it all comes down to how we understand something.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah. Well, Chris, you can understand the rabbit hole that one could easily go down with this way of thinking about knowledge, right? Like basically you could say nothing is actually true, and all knowledge that anybody possesses is just their take on information that they’ve obtained from whatever sources.

And so if all knowledge is just interpreted information from every which way, then how do people survive without feeling certain about things?

You’d think people would drop into cynicism, paralysis about making decisions and understanding things—even becoming nihilistic because nothing is actually true. Come on, Chris—how do we handle this?

Dr. Dwyer: Yeah, well, yeah—I see your point. And I think a lot of people have kind of gone down this rabbit hole. And I think a lot of people have done it in a kind of almost self-affirming way—from a mental health perspective it isn’t actually a bad thing, although in a cognitive perspective, completely wrong.

What I mean by that is, there’s a couple of parts in the book where I refer to Oprah. Oprah would tell you to “live your truth” kind of thing. And what that implies is everyone has their own reality. And of course everyone has their own reality, but that doesn’t change that we live in a shared reality.

And you have your different perspectives on things and you’re entitled to those perspectives, and I do mine and the like—but that doesn’t change what knowledge is from person to person. It just acknowledges that we have a different perspective on it.

So is there actually knowledge? Yeah, there is. But it’s taking what we know and we flip it on its side.

When we look at science—and good science at that—we typically think about scientists in a lab or looking at the stars trying to find something. That is true, and that helps form hypotheses for experiments and the like. But that’s not exactly true.

I often refer to the dirtiest word in critical thinking. The dirtiest word in critical thinking is “proof.” And I try to tell my students that as well.

Inevitably, you get to the conclusion section of an essay or an assignment: “And through this essay, I have proved that…” I say, “You haven’t proved anything.” I said, “I know for a fact you haven’t proved anything” because researchers have been dedicated their lives to doing this very topic above and beyond you and your two and a half hours sitting down writing this, and they haven’t proved it.

Why? Because we can’t prove anything. We can only disprove, from a philosophy of science perspective. And we think about things like falsification.

Psychologists listening to this will know that when we run our chi tests and our ANOVAs, it’s not that we’re proving the experimental hypothesis when we notice an effect. What we’re actually doing is we’re disproving the null hypothesis, which means that when we observe something happening, it’s not that we’re observing something happening—we’re actually saying it is not the case that nothing happened.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah.

Dr. Dwyer: And why do we say that? Well, we think what we’ve done—how we think we’ve intervened—is what’s doing the good job.

If you’ve got a new therapy, for the sake of argument, you’re running the therapy and you’ve noticed from time one to time two that there’s been a notable improvement, and compared to controls this is a significant effect—but that could be down to anything else in the world above and beyond the therapy itself.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, it’s very difficult to parse that out and control for things.

Dr. Dwyer: That’s right. And we do our best, and that’s why we use rigorous methods in our clinical trials and the like.

But it comes down to it at the end of the day that even our statistics are based on the idea that we’re not proving that something happened. We’re simply saying it is not the case that nothing happened.

So in that case, we’re not proving. We cannot prove. We can only disprove.

That’s where we take that idea of: is there anything that’s fact? Yes. There are plenty of facts out there. X doesn’t work. Y doesn’t work. Z doesn’t work.

Now, can you tell me what does work? No. No, we can’t.

But then again, we have to say: that’s not a bad thing. We’re just very cautious.

And you mentioned a lot of people could fall down a route of nihilism—“what does it matter? nothing is actually real.” In a way, this should be kind of liberating in the sense that science is amazing and it’s wonderful, and it’s opened up all these possibilities. We can look down this avenue for research and this avenue.

And I think if you want to treat it in a negative light, you can.

I’ll give you a really good example—it’s in the book as well: in 2006, Pluto was declassified as a planet. It was no longer a planet.

Dr. Kaplan: That’s right.

Dr. Dwyer: So we have eight planets, even though you and I and many of your listeners will have grown up with nine planets—and now we have eight.

And I always say that there’s two extremes of people in terms of the audience when they first hear this. One extreme will be someone like me, like, “Oh, this is amazing. This is so cool. Imagine that we are now at a point—millions and millions of miles away—we’re able to look at this celestial body and determine, based on certain characteristics, whether or not it’s a planet or a dwarf planet. We even have a classification system for this. That’s amazing. Way to go science.”

And then on the other hand, you have people going, “What the hell is wrong with these scientists? They can’t even count planets. It’s not that hard. Eight, nine—which is it?” And then they get aggravated and they say, “You can’t change something like this. There’s nine planets. We can count them. How much of our tax money is going towards counting planets?” And people get really riled up about it.

I will take the first perspective hands down all the time.

They know that things change. It’s not that there are no facts. It’s that knowledge is constantly changing.

So gravity, for the sake of argument. You take a sip from your glass. If you were to let go of that glass, what would happen?

Dr. Kaplan: It would fall and smash on the ground and I’d have to clean up my coffee.

Dr. Dwyer: You might wager your mortgage on it, right? And the reason that that’s the case is because of gravity. That glass is going to fall to the ground at an acceleration of 9.81 meters per second squared. That’s how good we are at measuring this stuff.

This is not really up for debate, but gravity remains a theory because you cannot prove the nature of gravity. It is what we observe at the moment and will continue to be the working model for how things are in terms of gravity—until something changes it. Until we advance knowledge so much that we learn something new about the nature of it.

That’s not a bad thing. That shouldn’t be scary. That should be exciting.

Dr. Kaplan: Well, Chris, going back to Pluto for a minute: one thing I was thinking is you’re right—people could have different reactions to Pluto being classified as a dwarf planet or a planetoid or whatever, and people could get up in arms about it.

But one thing is, as far as we know, nothing’s actually changed about Pluto. It’s the same rock with the same composition and the same spot in the solar system. It’s just we’ve chosen to define it differently.

Dr. Dwyer: Exactly. Exactly. And you know, a lot of this comes down to semantics.

I made the point earlier, right? I said, in the case of science and proving and disproving, I said, “It is not the case that nothing happened.” That’s a mouthful. And it takes people a hot second to kind of work their heads around it.

Then someone who’s very practical will say, “So something happened.” And I go, “No—well…” And then I go into that whole spiel about it. Yeah, something did happen, but we can’t be sure what happened. And “I don’t like your indecision.”

And that’s the kind of thing about critical thinking: sometimes we sacrifice the practical nature of things for precision.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah. So let’s get into something that’s related and is a little fuzzier perhaps, but I think it is very relevant.

Let’s talk about the unreliability of memory and experience. And I know you discussed this. People obviously use their memory of things—you’ve talked about that: the knowledge that people obtain from stuff and what they think about it.

And obviously their experience is navigating the world. And obviously, from what we’ve talked about, experiences can be flawed and so can memories of things—they can be distorted.

So how do people anchor truth in their own experience and memories if we know that there’s a very good chance that they’re flawed, or they have an altered perception of what actually happened or what somebody else might be experiencing? How do you think about that?

Dr. Dwyer: You know, I think that’s one of those million-dollar questions. I don’t think there is a way of overcoming it per se, but I think it’s one of those things that if we make people aware of it—more aware of it—and are willing to admit our own shortcomings in our own memory from time to time, and say, “Listen, we don’t always remember it right. There’s a very good chance you don’t either.”

I think a lot of that comes down to intellectual integrity. I don’t think enough people are willing to say “I don’t know.” I don’t think enough people are willing to say “I’m happy to look that up.”

When I was younger and we were kind of all doing our postgrads, and from time to time we’d be asked to go teach a class, the biggest fear among us as young 20-somethings was: imagine if we got asked a question in class and we didn’t know the answer.

We came up with all these possible ways of kind of dancing around it. And one of the more comical solutions was: if you were asked a question that you didn’t know, you’d say, “That’s a really good question. For homework this week, go home and get the answer.” And we all laughed.

But looking back at it years later, I said that’s one of the worst responses you could give because it’s actually putting your students off asking questions. They say, “Oh no—if I ask a question now in class, he’s going to make us do that for homework.” And the one thing I do want students [to do] now is ask me—ask me all of the questions.

And I will be honest with you. That’s the thing. There’s that intellectual integrity that one develops over time, particularly in our field, is that you’re willing to admit when you don’t know.

You say, “That’s kind of out of my remit of knowledge, but it’s a very interesting question.” And you go look it up, I’ll look it up too, and let’s discuss it next week. Great question. I’ll remember that come exam time because it’s really insightful.

And I think we need to show that we appreciate and we respect tough questions. But that’s not always the case.

We don’t always deal with intellectual integrity. And that’s not to say that people are always dealing with it.

If you ask me—and if I’m tired and I’m not really kind of in the right mindset—and you ask me a question, I might give you an answer that I think is right. Or I feel it’s probably the right answer, and that’s good enough.

It also comes down to how much I care about that topic. Do I value it? If I don’t value it, I probably won’t give you a very good answer. But if I do, I’m going to be very precise and as comprehensive as I possibly can.

So a lot of the way we dance around those kind of questions is: it depends. It’s a very indecisive kind of answer.

If you think about social psychology in general, we have all these social phenomena and social mechanisms at work, and we see them working in general—in most cases, we’ll say. But the reality is, it all depends on the situation: who’s there, time of day, are we tired, are we hungry—all these variables at play.

Now, more directly about your question: I used to think that I had a pretty good memory. I have a weird general knowledge of years and movies and war and history and music—and for whatever reason, I can kind of tell you a year, and I’m typically right about it. It’s a weird party trick.

But that belief has been reinforced over time by my friends who tell me that you’re weird and you have a good memory for years and events. It’s almost episodic in nature. And you believe them because you’re constantly told that.

My outlook about myself in terms of my memory and how great it was went completely upside down only a couple of years ago.

I had a very definitive memory for 9/11. I was living in New York at the time. I was still in high school. And I could tell you, hour by hour, what was going on that day—lots of details, very thorough.

The main point is: we got to the end of the day and everyone went off on their own way—my mother, my father, and I. And I sat down and I watched a Mets game. And they were wearing FDNY and NYPD hats. It was emotional and cathartic, as you’d expect. And I probably went to bed afterwards. I don’t really remember, but I remember watching the game.

Then I saw a documentary a couple of years ago in which they told the story of that game. But that game wasn’t played for another week and a half.

Dr. Kaplan: Oh, wow.

Dr. Dwyer: That did not happen on 9/11. And then when I hear it—of course it was. Everything was shut down. They closed everything down. And I said, “Then what the hell was I actually doing?”

And I could actually go all the way back: all those other details—100% corroborated by other people.

But because there was a gap in my knowledge and because I knew it was such an important day, especially in the young life of someone so young, but for such a big thing to happen, there was that gap in the evening.

I actually asked a couple of friends very recently, and apparently we were all on AOL. We were all on Instant Messenger back and forth going, “What the hell is going on?” And there was a lot of probably misinformation back and forth too, which is interesting in its own right.

But what was happening was my brain was telling me, in light of all this emotion, that you need to finish the story. Why is there a massive gap in your story? And so it takes something that’s meaningful and I remember from around that time and plops it right in there.

Dr. Kaplan: Well, it’s a good example of how it obviously was a very, very emotional experience for you, as it was for many people—but I didn’t realize you were in New York City at that time.

Dr. Dwyer: Long Island. Long Island.

Dr. Kaplan: Close enough. Yeah, it’s close enough. Close enough, yeah.

Dr. Dwyer: We knew people.

But anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that—and we know this in psychology—that when strong emotions are involved in situations, then memories can get bounced around in all sorts of different directions and your experience of things can be quite affected by that.

So that’s a good example. And you’re right: the mind maybe just sort of fills in the blanks to make the story make sense. And when you were looking back on it afterwards, it didn’t quite make sense because you were putting the pieces together and they didn’t quite add up.

Dr. Kaplan: So I think that’s a really good example of that.

Dr. Dwyer: Yeah. And I think it’s one of those things as well: if we’re honest with ourselves about how we remember things, what we remember, and how accurate that information is, that leads to… I don’t want to say developing that intellectual integrity, but I think it’s a good indicator for: we’re not always right. And we’ve got to be careful about that.

Because when it comes down to making really important decisions in our own lives and our personal lives, that matters. That matters big time.

We often think about thinking and decision making in the real world these days in a very social way. I often hear people ask me about critical thinking in terms of socializing, social media, conversation, argumentation. And yeah, they’re right. There’s a lot of that in a debate format.

The person we’re constantly talking to—the person we’re talking with most of the time—is ourselves. We’re having that inner dialogue and saying, “Well, what do I really think about that?”

It’s about being honest with ourselves and saying, “Could I be wrong?” And “How do I really know that that’s how it played out?”

And like I said, I’ve gone to friends to corroborate. I was like, “What were we talking [about] that day? What happened? Do you remember?” And it’s going to a source and it’s going to a credible source, and it’s not trusting our gut necessarily when we know that there’s probably a more credible reference to engage.

Dr. Kaplan: So Chris, talking about credible versus not credible sources, I have to ask you about the internet in this interview.

Dr. Dwyer: Yeah, I know. Where do we begin?

Dr. Kaplan: Well, look, these days everybody is an accidental epistemologist sleuthing around on the internet, trying to find the information they need to prove whatever—or to get information to make decisions or to make arguments. And we all know that.

I think at the time that I interviewed you last time, we talked a bit about conspiracy theories, and a lot of them were flying all over the place because of the pandemic. So things were ripe for that at that time.

But obviously the internet has become the major source of information for many, if not most people, to try to get information to understand the world around them and make their judgments and decisions about things.

Okay, we know there are problems there, but can you summarize for us: what do you think are the most common mistakes people make when it comes to gathering information from the internet to gain their knowledge and understanding and make decisions? What do we need to look out for?

Dr. Dwyer: Well, I’ll tell you. Just looking at my own students: a first-year freshman coming in—they use the internet in a way where they go to what they believe is the source. And what I say is: believing the source is another example of that “I don’t know what I don’t know.”

If they don’t even know that there is something like a research article—if they didn’t know that this is freely available online, that you could read the study—if they don’t know it, how are they going to find it?

So I get a lot of those simple Psychology.com answers. I get a lot of wiki answers. And students are referencing them. They think they’ve done a great job.

And I go, “You know, they even have references on Wikipedia. Even if you went to those and read those sources, I’d give you a bit of credit for that.” But I’m like, “Just referencing wiki…”

Now, I’m not saying wiki’s wrong all of the time. I’ve no problem with it. As a matter of fact, I think Wikipedia is a great source as a starting-off point to kind of give you a taste of what a field is kind of like. But would I trust it wholeheartedly? Absolutely not.

The internet gets a bad rap. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. But if I’m honest about my PhD and looking back at it, I’d say less than 5% of the sources that I actually used were tangible hard-copy books and journals. I went online and I went to the appropriate academic sources and I found all of these papers. It was amazing. Couldn’t believe it.

And even if I didn’t have access, I could request access—and someone has sent me a paper from around the world. Isn’t this amazing?

I just say to myself: if this was the 1960s, my PhD would have taken forever because it would have taken me forever to accumulate all this information—where it’s at my fingertips.

That’s an amazing thing.

And I think you’ve got sources like Google Scholar where they give you pretty much everything you can—you might be behind paywalls and the like—but at least you’re aware of these things exist. And you know the titles and the authors. And I think that’s a great starting point. I just wish more people knew about that.

I wish that being a little bit more critical about the sources on the internet that you’re looking at—paying a little more attention to that—that’s important.

The other thing that’s important is…

Say, for instance, I’m on Instagram. I just go on and I don’t use it for work. Maybe there is a great application for my work on Instagram, but I’m not really seeing it yet. I’m more of a Twitter, LinkedIn guy—and Twitter is not even Twitter anymore. Maybe TikTok one day, but that’s another one. I haven’t even signed up for it.

But I’m on Instagram because I have friends in America who send me funny memes and reels. It’s purely leisure and entertainment for me.

But what I have noticed about that—and this is really tough—is that I’ve signed up for no political influencers or users, nothing like that. But it’s gravitating towards me as a 40-year-old man, I guess, that I’m going to be some way politically inclined.

Truth be told, I despise politics. I’m probably the most centrist political person there is, and I take pride in that. I take pride in that because I just find it so easy that I either believe in that or I don’t believe that.

And I say to myself: politics—it’s a social construct. It’s a belief system. Don’t talk about politics—try not to.

Dr. Kaplan: Talk about belief systems where people become so emotionally attached to the belief, regardless of the actual facts or information—right? I mean, politics is a perfect example of polarization for the purpose of being aligned with a particular side of things.

Dr. Dwyer: Absolutely. And that’s the thing. I’m getting bombarded—and it’s hilarious—because I’ll get very, very far-left propaganda in some videos, and I go, “Oh…” and that’s rage bait to me because I don’t agree with any of that.

But then the next video would be extremely far-right stuff as well, and I go, “Oh, I hate that too.” So I’m constantly enraged by [it]. I don’t have an echo chamber on Instagram where there’s anything I actually do like—unless it’s absolutely hilarious. And again, it’s down to my friends sending me comedy stuff.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, maybe the true barometer of a critical thinker is one which all sides of the political spectrum have just given up on you.

Dr. Dwyer: Yeah. Maybe so. Maybe so.

But I do find it annoying. And I asked my wife, I was like, “What is it?” She’s like, “Are you sure you don’t follow…?” I was like, “I don’t. I definitely don’t follow anything.” We’re trying to figure out the echo chamber.

And I’m pretty sure it’s just down to the fact that I’m a 40-year-old man and they’re making certain guesses about my background, where I live, and what I’m likely to believe in. Not necessarily that that’s the case.

But my point is: watching these videos, I can see how they can reel you in. I can see how if you’re doom scrolling and you’re going through and you’re spending your 20, 30 seconds on a video and you’re just constantly barraged with this information, it’s very difficult to start teasing out real life and what’s propaganda.

Dr. Kaplan: Right. Well, sure—because then you’re getting fed the algorithms of the things that the social media thinks you want to see, and then that reinforces your reality. I think that was confirmation bias—we were talking about something like that in our last interview, right?

Dr. Dwyer: Yeah, absolutely. And so it’s exploiting that. It’s trying to find what kind of grinds your gears or what turns you on or whatever it is, and it exploits that so you go further down the rabbit hole.

And whether or not that’s real life—is that how most people feel? Or is it just some algorithm, like you said?

And I think that’s one of those misinformation bits now. It’s not so much “This is fake news.” It’s actually you’re being groomed in a way.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah.

Dr. Dwyer: It’s completely different than engaging information. It is essentially priming you.

So I think that’s problematic. It becomes the kind of “what next” thing.

In terms of AI, I don’t think we’ve really learned enough about it. I know ChatGPT can give you misinformation.

Let me give you a great example of misinformation: you and I were supposed to meet last week, remember? And we missed because of time zone stuff. And I apologize because I’m the host—it’s my responsibility to make sure it all happens.

But to my defense, I did ask ChatGPT: “What time is it in Ireland currently?” so I made sure it was the right time. Guess what? It gave me the wrong time. It was just flat-out wrong.

Now, I know there’s been a time zone change recently in the U.S. and I think there was one recently in Ireland, so things kind of got jumbled up with times, but ChatGPT couldn’t figure it out for me. And ultimately it messed me up. I looked at that as my source of information. It was wrong.

It’s a funny one because it’s no big deal, and we’ll meet up and we’ll chat anyway. But if that was a job interview, that’d be disastrous for someone. That’d have real repercussions.

And that’s a simple enough question—what time is it? So you have those times where it does kind of screw up.

Now, I’m not a tinfoil-hat kind of guy, but I don’t use ChatGPT. I think I’ve seen Terminator 2 way too many times as a kid.

My best friend—he’s a smart guy—he uses it. He asked me about three or four weeks ago, he’s like, “What’s your take on it? What do you think about students using it?” All that kind of stuff.

And I was like, “I think there’s a time and a place. I think it can be helpful.”

I was skeptical of a lot of the things that it could do, and I told him that. I said, “I can’t give you a definitive answer because I don’t use it.”

But I said, “I know for a fact that when a student submits to me an assignment that has AI on it, I’m pretty good at picking it out”—for no other reason than it’s just the type of language. Number one, what I think human beings use—but I don’t like to judge—certainly younger college students.

I said, “Will it ever give you a critically thought-out answer?”

And I said, “AI is a collation of the knowledge that’s out there. And there’s always conflicting knowledge. Of course it’s going to weigh up. It’s probably going to account for more popular ideas.”

And I said, “I’d be really interested—could it give you a critically considered answer?”

So he goes, “All right, I’ll ask it to think critically.” And I said, “Okay, fine.”

He goes, “Do you have a specific question—a short question—you’d like it to answer?”

And I said, “Yeah. Tell it to think critically and ask it if smoking causes cancer.”

And that’s one of my favorite examples from class in terms of—yes, practically speaking, that comes back to this idea we were talking about earlier. It’s like: practically speaking, what’s the simple answer here? Yes, smoking causes cancer.

We know this correlation versus causation thing. Technically—yeah, technically. But the correlation is so strong in this case that it is statistically overwhelming.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah.

Dr. Dwyer: And all I wanted AI to give me back in the answer was: if it said yes, that’s fine—as long as it added that kind of qualifier. If it said no, it definitely needed to get into it.

But I was amazed because he sent me exactly what it said. And it’s giving me all kind of logical mechanics. I was interested in seeing that.

But the fact that it said “probabilistically overwhelming”… and what did I say earlier? I said, “Wow—that’s what I was looking for.” That’s really what I was looking for.

So I was impressed because it gave me that, but it also gave me a whole line of logic.

Now, if we asked it another nine—say, out of ten—if we asked another nine crummy questions, where it’d be tough to work out even as us trying to work it out—how would it deal? I don’t know if it would deal with it as well.

But again, how you asked the question mattered, right?

Dr. Kaplan: And you asked it to think critically.

Dr. Dwyer: Exactly.

Dr. Kaplan: So you could ask it the right question to get the best possible answer. But a random person who isn’t a professor in critical thinking could ask a slightly off question and get a slightly different answer. And AI is just trying to answer the question as best it can based on what was asked. And that therein is part of the problem, right?

Dr. Dwyer: Absolutely. The prompt massively matters. Definitely.

And it’s much like confirmation bias.

That was another thing that I asked him. I was like, “Can you rework a confirmation bias?” And he goes, “I knew you were going to ask me that.” And I go, “What do you mean?” And he goes, “I asked it to tell me that the earth is flat, you know, and look for stuff.”

And ChatGPT was like, “Actually, the earth isn’t flat.” And I was thankful for that. He goes, “And then ChatGPT was saying, ‘Listen, there are some people who believe it, and these are the reasons why they would believe it. However, an outrageous amount—an alarming range—of people signal that yes, the earth is spherical, and what we know according to classical Newtonian physics…’”

So I was happy to see that it didn’t fall prey as bad as I thought it might to confirmation bias. Like, can you prompt it to give the answer you wanted to?

Just having the wherewithal to say, “Please think critically. Show me your thinking behind this question.” Will people do that? No, they won’t. They’ll ask, “What day did Elvis die?”

It’ll be very interesting to see how AI evolves in this whole conversation about knowledge and information. I’m watching it very carefully because I’m really fascinated by it.

But especially for you and what you do, it’ll be really interesting to see how that unfolds.

Dr. Kaplan: It’s extremely scary. Things are changing so rapidly, even in the past 20 years.

In my PhD, I talked about the new knowledge economy. And the basis for that was: at the turn of the millennium, we were kind of doubling the amount of information that we had previously had available because the internet had taken off.

By that stage, I think the internet kind of was hitting many American homes around ’94, ’95, I guess. I’d say by ’98, ’99, a majority of homes had had the internet.

And then it’s not unreasonable to say, okay, yeah—we’re doubling information that’s available out there now because of how much we’re using.

But just in the past 25 years, the amount of data that’s created each day—the metrics for that are meaningless to me. There’s a lot out there.

How do we parse through the nonsense and get to the good stuff?

Dr. Dwyer: That’s why I say to my students: always just go to the journal articles. Just go to the research. Start from there. And if you need someone to help explain that to you, there typically is.

If a big study comes out of Harvard one day, there’s bound to be some kind of news article discussing it in a practical way.

Dr. Kaplan: Even there, Chris—talking about scientific research and published articles by seemingly reputable people—I’m interested in this recently because I’ve been studying a lot about the early research that’s been done on cholesterol and LDL and cardiovascular disease and that kind of stuff.

And it’s very interesting because once you start going down that rabbit hole, you see that there’s a lot of research that has been funded by the pharmaceutical industries. So there are biases that are potentially built into that.

Now, I’m not here trying to take a stand on any of this stuff, but it’s just very interesting when you think about where research actually comes from. Then you also might start to question: are these results valid or not?

When there are biases involved with the researchers who are doing the research, then you start to wonder those kinds of things as well.

Dr. Dwyer: Absolutely, yeah. So in a way, I would almost say that that’s like critical thinking Mach 2.

Assuming Mach 1 is: forget about what websites say. Unless you have some level of expertise, I don’t want to hear from you. In which case, what I mean is: look at the research.

But when we pump that up a level: look at who’s funding it—agreed 100%. Look at what school of thought that research is coming from.

You’re going to have sociology, psychology, and philosophy quite often examining the same topic areas—completely different approaches to investigating those areas, different perspectives, different mindsets. We have to address those. We have to keep those in mind.

Politically speaking—if we were to politicize, and I think it’s a shame that we do politicize or have to politicize academia now—Jonathan Haidt, he’s a social psychologist, he gave one of the best lectures I’ve ever seen. He gave a talk at Duke University. It’s on YouTube.

But he brought it to my attention: he was looking at the political affiliations of different lecturers and professors. There was a study— a few studies done—but I think as of 2016 in the social sciences, it was a 17-to-1 ratio for left-leaning political persuasion. 17 to 1. That was up from 14 to 1, I think, in 1996. So that’s a massive change in only 20 years.

What it says to me is: we go into a psychology lecture—even if the lecture doesn’t say anything about “I’m a Democrat” or “I’m this, I’m that,” or left-leaning or whatever, and they try to keep as unbiased as possible—there’s always going to be some kind of implicit influence in the way in which they want information [and] the information they choose to present to students.

And they might be very cautious…

Dr. Kaplan: No, I understand, Chris. I mean, it’s natural that people are going to talk about the issues and information that are important to them from the angle or perspective that they’re leaning toward—without any malintent or desire to persuade anybody into any particular political orientation. That’s just the way we’re built, right?

Dr. Dwyer: Exactly. Exactly. And our biases, our experiences, our beliefs will always come through. And we’re so concerned with the explicit way of doing that, but we implicitly do it as well. And that’s kind of what I’m saying here.

But we have to be aware of this. We have to account for this when we’re looking at research.

And then you have other research fields that have become talking points in the news as of late—or in academic culture at the very least—that might start their research from a biased perspective. And so if you have a biased perspective to begin with, well, how can we trust that research?

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah—there’s an agenda.

Dr. Dwyer: Exactly. And so that’s problematic.

And I’m not saying that’s all of [academia]. There’s a lot of good research out there, but there’s a lot of bad research, and we have to be cognizant of methodologies and look for starting from a biased perspective.

Dr. Kaplan: Chris, let’s pivot to something a little bit lighter and more fun here, okay?

I know that you’ve talked about creativity. And I believe you touch on creativity in your book, correct?

Dr. Dwyer: That’s right, yeah.

Dr. Kaplan: A lot of times people think of creativity and critical thinking as sort of polar opposites. Like either you’re creative and you’re all over the place and you’re not really bothered by critical thinking or being rational or whatever—and then the opposite is true.

If I’m a critical thinker, I’m no fun at all at a party because all I’m doing is fact-checking people or whatnot.

Tell us: are these things actually opposites? How can we reconcile these things in a way that is a little kinder to both sides of this?

Dr. Dwyer: Yeah, so just as much as critical thinking gets misinterpreted, I think in public culture, creative thinking does too.

If we’re going to go for this stereotype of creativity—free-spirited, doing my art, I’m creatively minded—whether it’s music or painting or drawing or fiction writing—that’s not the only type of creative thinking there.

If we think about design work, for the sake of argument, in terms of a marketing standpoint, there are really important decisions to be made there. There’s research evidence behind design that gives it its “good idea, bad idea,” but it still requires quite a bit of creativity. It’s not just paint-by-the-numbers.

If we’re looking at psychological terminology and definition, we go back to the likes of Diane Halpern—who’s a big name in critical thinking—and Bob Sternberg, who wrote the foreword for this book. That was a really, really lovely addition.

They paint creativity in terms of—much like critical thinking—a higher-order metacognitive process in which we have an outcome that is of utility, but that’s also novel or unusual.

When we hear “novel” and “unusual,” we kind of go ahead with that. But you can be creative and come up with something wonderful, but is it really of utility? Will it stand the test of whatever the parameters actually are?

If you were to look at it in terms of a design issue or marketing, you almost apply a problem-solving protocol, right? You go: I’ve got my brief, I’ve got my parameters, I’ve got my restrictions. I have to do these things. So already the creativity is already kind of limited—to an extent.

You do what you feel is right. You do what experience tells you. You do all these things that are completed, the antithesis of what we know from critical thinking.

But what they’re doing is they’re entertaining these ideas. And I think that’s useful as well.

Just because I love critical thinking and value critical thinking doesn’t mean that we have to turn off this other part of us.

But the point is: you’ll create, and you’ll do all these things, but at the end, you’re evaluating that. You’re saying, “No, that’s a terrible idea. Why did I choose that?” You trial-and-error it. You put all these fail-safes in so you’re making sure that your creation actually does what it’s intended to do.

Dr. Kaplan: Right. So in other words, a creative person could be critical about their creative process—hopefully in a positive way. Not “I suck at being creative, so let me stop doing that.” But more like: “I’m creating something, and let me use all of the information I have from my experience, from my emotional part of my life, from looking at other artists,” and have a way of fine-tuning my creativity and push it forward in a way that is pleasing to people ultimately, in some way.

Dr. Dwyer: I always see the similarities between creativity and critical thinking first before I start picking out the differences.

The things that they have so much in common: it’s higher-order cognition. It’s metacognitive. You are thinking about thinking during it. And what you’re doing is you’re synthesizing information in both cases.

Maybe with critical thinking, you’re taking one research study here and another research study here—okay, together these infer this conclusion; this is what I should do.

Creativity—you’re taking a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. It’s inspiration here.

That traditional look on creativity—you would say: “This is what I’ve created, warts and all. I don’t care if you like it or you don’t like it.” And that’s all well and good. If it makes you feel good, then it’s fulfilled its purpose.

But if there was a specific utility to it, you’d want to do those checks, you’d want to do those evaluations, you’d want to try that, you’d want to simulate it.

Again, it depends. It comes down to how we conceptualize creative thinking.

Dr. Kaplan: So Chris, I have another one here. How about the sister of creativity—maybe intuition?

People who intuitively come to decisions about things, and they’re not necessarily thinking critically in their mind about it. They kind of feel like this is the right answer for me, and it’s just coming from the ether or wherever.

What do you have to say about intuition?

Dr. Dwyer: I’m going to play good cop, bad cop on this, okay?

We look at the word “Eureka”—it’s come to me; I’ve had a great epiphany, like lightning.

That’s where, when we hear the word from cognitive psychology, “heuristics,” it stems from Eureka—I have found it. And that’s problematic because you found something, but where did you find it?

And just as you said, it’s kind of like from the ether. The likelihood is it’s either an attitude, a feeling, a belief, or something you’ve experienced in some way in the past. And that’s well and good. It might work and it might be right—but it might not. So why would you risk it if what you’re doing matters?

Intuition—good cop perspective—is evolutionarily advantageous. It is an amazing artifact of what it is to be human that we are able to make split-second decisions like that. It’s incredible.

It’s evolutionarily advantageous because we’d have to be aware of predators around us and your body goes into flight mode or fight mode or freeze and appease and what have you. It’s for our benefit. It is a good thing.

But it’s also a good thing in terms of making bad decisions or good decisions—and it doesn’t matter in situations that don’t matter.

I often talk about: every time you order a cup of coffee—one coffee place used to boast 19,000 possible permutations of beverages. We don’t go in and eliminate 18,999 before we order our coffee. We go for our regular, and that’s what we want because you can’t really screw that one up. It’ll be fine. It’ll be good enough. It doesn’t matter.

That’s what intuition is. It gives us answers to questions that don’t really matter or shouldn’t really matter.

Which route should I take to work today to avoid traffic? I’m going to get that wrong half the time, but so what? I lose five minutes here, ten minutes there—what’s the big deal?

So intuition is not a bad thing per se. It gets a bad rap a lot of the time. I paint it a very bad picture in the book because we don’t want that when we’re thinking critically. That’s the last thing we want to do.

But for topics that don’t matter—for things that don’t really matter to us—intuition is fine.

Going back to the idea of creative thinking: if we’re involved heavily in creative thinking, we’d want a lot of our intuition. If it turns out our intuition was wrong, we can eliminate that later on in the process.

But intuition is powerfully important for those things.

But when the stakes are high—when things matter—I’m not necessarily going to go with my gut. I’m going to look at what the research says. I’m going to look at what the experts say.

And when I’m evaluating all of that material, and collating it together to infer a solution, that’s where my gut might come in in terms of good decision making.

Assuming I’m used to playing the part of the critical thinker—that I’ve gone through this process enough times—I know what to look for in terms of credibility. I know when something looks a little sketchy. That intuition is fine.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

It’s that intuition that automatically jumps at you and says, “You need to pick this one; you need to pick that one.” It might be right. That’s fine. But let me evaluate all the other perspectives first.

Dr. Kaplan: Right. I’m going to go on this very important medication or choose not to go on this very important medication because of an intuition—maybe not the best situation in that specific time to make a decision based on intuition.

Dr. Dwyer: I mean—and that’s not to say if your intuition says, “I shouldn’t go on it,” your intuition may be right. But why are you taking that risk?

A critically considered perspective would be to see what your doctor says. Seek a second opinion. Hell—seek a third opinion.

Even go online and check out reputable sources on that drug. Now, the reputable sources are not those people who have an axe to grind against that drug.

Dr. Kaplan: Which you see a lot.

Dr. Dwyer: Which you see a lot. Yeah. So you don’t want that, but you also don’t want the makers of [the drug] either. You want to read a clinical trial on that. You need to see: are there actually any adverse effects? There’s always going to be adverse effects or side effects, but they’re statistically unlikely.

And why I say unlikely is because the majority of the time you don’t see those, but they can happen. That’s why they have to put those risks down. Doesn’t mean it’s always going to happen.

You’re doing a pros and cons list—essentially a simplified version. I’m simplifying it quite a bit. But that’s what you’re doing. And you’re trying to decide that way.

But just going after your gut is probably not the best idea. You want to look into it as much as you can.

Dr. Kaplan: Okay, Chris, I’ve got one more curveball type of question for you today. And you’re probably not prepared for this one, which is why it’s going to be fun.

But I got the idea of this question from your most recent Psychology Today blog post—and this is about the perception of time. I think that’s your most recent blog post. You might have written one since then, but I saw that one and it was quite interesting.

I’m curious about this idea about time from a critical thinker’s perspective.

Chris—does time actually exist? And is our perception of time somehow affected by our cognitive awareness? I’m just curious about your thoughts about time.

Dr. Dwyer: It’s such a fascinating topic for people.

First and foremost: I love sci-fi. I love time travel movies. It’s a big interest of mine. Obviously, in terms of physics—space-time continuums and all that.

From an Einsteinian perspective, what is time? Time is relative. So does that make it not exist? Yes, I guess it doesn’t exist. But we also have a notion of what is time.

So from an epistemological standpoint, yes—time is very real. Time is what permitted us to meet up together to have this conversation. But it’s a human construct because we have parameters on time. We’ve decided that we’re going to have 12 hours in the morning and 12 hours in the evening.

So yeah, we have time. But from a perspective, it changes. We say time flies when you’re having fun. Time flies when you get older.

I remember everything from the year 1995. I think I probably remember every day of the summer of 1995. I could tell you the Top 40 list from 1995. I was only 10 years old in 1995. I was at that age where I was aware of things in the outside world. Everything was so exciting to me.

You have people out there whose earliest memories are from age two. My earliest memory from around age two: I remember WrestleMania III had just come on, and my mom and dad were getting my little blue onesies on me. I remember wanting to see this match because it was Andre the Giant vs. Hulk Hogan.

It’s a silly thing, but it was one of the things that—I guess I always liked wrestling. I watched wrestling on a weekly basis with my dad. A meaningful situation because it was such a big match.

The point is: when you’re younger, once you’ve developed—around age two—your brain is working in a way where it wasn’t really tracking memories before. It’s tracking things now. You remember things. Your language development is becoming in ways in reference to things that have happened before.

So when you think of object permanence: babies don’t have it until a certain age. If something’s gone, it no longer exists.

Dr. Kaplan: Exactly.

Dr. Dwyer: They are aware once they get object permanence: “Oh, it was in front of me, and now you’ve put it behind your back because I remember you having it in front of me.” And then they walk around you and they go, “There it is.”

And so memory starts kind of developing there.

But it’s interesting because everything starts happening so fast for kids. They’re sponges. They have no reference point. Their whole life is only a few months—a handful of months—when you really think about it.

But every piece of information coming in takes forever for them.

My daughter is six now and she remembers a reasonable amount of information, but it’s amazing the detail—the obscure things—that she would remember. I say, “Why would you remember that?” “I just do.” Because she doesn’t have much reference at all.

That’s her whole world there. Where I’m a little different—I have 40 years. I do very well to remember things that mattered to me in my childhood because I had very little reference then.

But people talk about, “I don’t even know what I had for breakfast.” That’s not a stretch of the imagination for anyone of a certain age because the fact is that these things aren’t important to us.

Dr. Kaplan: Are you saying that you would expect time to be slower for children than for adults?

Dr. Dwyer: Absolutely. Children are absorbing so much novel information that everything seems relevant. There’s just more stuff.

Whereas when you’re an adult and you’re going through your mundane day-to-day, it just sort of passes by and you’re not paying much attention to it, so it goes by quicker.

Dr. Kaplan: Is that your thesis around this?

Dr. Dwyer: Yeah, absolutely.

There’s a philosophical slant on it too. Existentially speaking, if a four-year-old is only around for four years—like I said—they don’t have much reference. Everything is important.

Dr. Kaplan: Okay, Chris. So we agree that perhaps in general, children feel like time is slower than adults—where time seems to pass quicker for the reasons we just talked about.

So why is it then that adults sometimes have differing perceptions on the passage of time? Adults will say sometimes time seems like it’s passing quickly, and sometimes it seems like it’s passing more slowly.

And I guess the related question is: how can we have it pass more slowly, more of the time? Because adults usually complain that time seems like it’s passing too quickly.

Dr. Dwyer: I think you kind of alluded to it earlier. Being an adult involves a lot of adulting, and a lot of that is quite mundane.

Looking at it from a cognitive schema perspective: we know, we expect all these things we deal with day-to-day. You have a schedule. You know what’s coming up. You know you need to do this. You might not be happy that you need to do this, but you kind of get through it. And you don’t have to work terribly hard sometimes on these admins, these errands.

Where everything is so exciting for a kid: “This is my first trip to this kind of shop.”

I can imagine going into the supermarket and you walk past the fish section—you don’t think about that anymore. It’s just like, “Oh, fish.” Or I remember walking past a fishmonger when I’m little and going, “Oh my god, what is this?” And then I’d say to my mom, “What is that?” She goes, “It’s fish. You’ve smelled fish before.” And it’s like, “No, this is weird.”

So everything is new and they’re taking in everything—like I said, little sponges—where we’re just kind of flying by the seat of our pants, relying on our schema, relying on our heuristics, just kind of following an experience-based protocol as we go through life.

And some people say, “Oh, that week flew,” and it’s probably because nothing monumentally important happened. You just went through the motions.

So I guess then—to address the second part of your question—what can we do to slow things down?

It’s a cliché, but it is “wake up and smell the coffee.” Evaluate what’s going on in your life and what’s important to you, and what do you wish you could do more of?

It can be pursuing a new hobby. If you have a family and you want to spend more time with your family—make time for that. Make room for that.

I think it’s important that we, every now and then, do that inventory of our lives.

Some people have that horrible habit of—that’s what they think about before they go to sleep. They can’t sleep, and they’re thinking about all those things they should be doing. Then by the time they wake up in the morning, they go, “Oh, off to work—I’ve got to get going,” and it becomes this vicious cycle.

But I think it’s important to evaluate goals and think about what you want to achieve, and take time out for yourself to explore something new, something different. Create that novelty in your own life so that it will be memorable.

I took my kids to a pumpkin patch for Halloween a couple of weeks ago. And I haven’t been to a pumpkin patch since I was about seven years old. It was incredible. And it’s a day I’ll never forget, largely because it was so new for me as well.

I knew what to expect. I knew what was going to be there. But living it is so much different than…

Dr. Kaplan: Oh, it’s so true. And so many people, when they have children, say that it’s sort of like reliving childhood again—maybe from a different lens. But I think that’s very true.

There’s a lot of opportunity to shake things up and do things differently than how you have done them as an adult once you have children.

That’s a great point.

Dr. Dwyer: Yeah, absolutely.

And to be honest with you: I’ve got a lot of things on in my life. If you were to tell me we’re going to…

This pumpkin patch, as it turns out, was about an hour and a half away from our house. So it’s a three-hour spin, doing the whole thing.

If you were to tell me, “We’re going to go to a pumpkin patch and we’re going to walk around for a couple hours and it’s going to be cold and wet, and this is one of your days off,” it’s like: no. If someone approached me with that, I’d say no.

But it was that I saw a picture of it being advertised. I said, “That looks really cool.” So because it was my idea and something kind of hit me and said I would like to do that.

But the fact is: we went, and I wasn’t even sure it was a good idea. But when we got there and we went through the day, and we’re there about an hour or so, I remember looking at the kids running around—even the silly stuff we were doing.

We got a bite to eat there. They had mini golf there. It was fun. There was stuff to do.

I remember looking at the kids and I’m like, “Glad I came. Glad we did this.” I didn’t think I was going to enjoy it as much as I did, but I’m glad I kind of picked it out and said, “Let’s do this.”

Because like I said, if someone had said it to me, I’d be like, “You’re crazy. No way. Don’t want to do that.”

Dr. Kaplan: Do you celebrate Halloween in Ireland the same way that we do in the U.S.?

Dr. Dwyer: We do now. That’s only kind of changed maybe in the last 15 to 20 years. Trick-or-treating wasn’t really a big thing before that.

We used to have bonfire nights. That was the big thing—there would just be bonfires, and maybe watching old horror movies.

Dr. Kaplan: Oh, fun.

Dr. Dwyer: Yeah.

Dr. Kaplan: Well, Chris, let’s start winding down here with this interview, which has been super fun and lively. I’ve enjoyed it.

Maybe you could leave us with a couple of thoughts here briefly.

Back to your book about knowledge: tell us maybe one thing in your book that you think readers will find the most uncomfortable, and what you hope readers take away from it that’s most important.

Dr. Dwyer: Most uncomfortable… I hope most of it is uncomfortable because I think sometimes you need to put caution into people.

One of the main messages is that life is uncertainty. We don’t need to be afraid of that. We need to embrace that. We need to be happy about that. I think it’s a good thing because it makes us more careful in our decision making.

So if big decisions scare you—good. That’s a good first step.

What should be concerning to people is that their gut is not always right, regardless of what they’ve been told. I know it’s very popular in pop culture—that belief.

What might be kind of disarming to people is that their feelings don’t matter. Their beliefs don’t matter.

I had a student last week who asked me, when she was writing an assignment, she goes, “So are we just supposed to write down our feelings about this?” And I told her, “I don’t care about your feelings.” Perfectly honest and pure deadpan too—no comedy about it.

Even though the rest of the class started laughing hysterically, I said, “I don’t care how you feel. I care what you can evidence. That’s what I care [about]—how you can use that evidence information and apply it in a meaningful way.”

Because as you said earlier, our feelings and our attitudes and all of that—that’s always going to come through in some way, implicitly, explicitly, however. But let us do that in a way where it’s as objective as it possibly can be.

I remember I wrote a piece years ago—one of the first times I wrote about emotion being a significant barrier to critical thinking—and I said, “You need to leave the emotion at the door.”

And of course there were comments. One comment was: “This is a stupid statement because you can never eliminate emotion. Emotion is always there.”

And I said, “You’re absolutely 100% right. But obviously you didn’t read the whole part—because we have to do this as best we can.”

Because emotion is always going to creep in. It’s always going to tell us what you think, what you feel, and to judge. It’s that System 1 getting in the way of that System 2 thinking.

You need to acknowledge it and just put it to the side. And people don’t like that.

That’s one thing I’m noticing now. I’m surprised there is as much resistance to this idea that their feelings don’t matter.

Dr. Kaplan: That’s the thing: people feel like their feelings are uniquely something that they own. And if they’re being denied the right to have their feelings, somehow they’re being denied the right to exist or something. People have very strong thoughts and feelings about that.

Dr. Dwyer: Yeah, absolutely. And people are entitled to that. I have zero problem with people having feelings.

It’s a strange thing for someone in psychology to say “feelings are useless” or “let’s ignore them”—that’s counterintuitive to good mental health, obviously.

But strictly in terms of critical thinking, we have to put that to the side and say, “What can I evidence?”

I think that’s sometimes a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah. And then how about what you hope that people take most from the book?

Dr. Dwyer: That we’re not as smart as we think we are—even though we are incredible. The human mind is an amazing thing, what it can accomplish. But we are not as right as we often think.

Daniel Kahneman made an allusion to this in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He said: people value their experience, particularly when they have a lot of experience. The problem is that people might just have a lot of experience doing the wrong thing. I love the way he puts that.

But I think we can also say that people might have a lot of experience doing something suboptimally.

And what I mean by that is: it’s not that you’re doing it wrong, because if you’re doing something wrong you’d eventually cop on—you’d eventually, “Oh, maybe I should do it this way.”

But I think it’s more insidious when you’re doing something and it kind of works, or it works well enough. We don’t see that there is a better way we could be doing it.

So it’s not that we’re going through life making mistakes all the time. It’s that we’re going through life not realizing that if we just tweak one or two things through better thinking, we could be doing it better.

And I suppose that people are open to being wrong. People are more open to saying “I don’t know.” People are more open to asking for help, asking questions, and engaging credible sources—instead of disagreeing because it doesn’t feel right, and then making 20 YouTube videos about it and trying to start a cult essentially around some asinine concept.

But I think if people just own up to the potential of being wrong, I think we’d be in a better working world—a more efficient world, shall we say.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah. Very wise words, Chris, and thank you for that.

And your book is super interesting. And by the way, I wish I was a student in one of your classes. It sounds like you’re a really fun and interesting professor. So your students are lucky to have you at the university.

Dr. Dwyer: I appreciate that. I try. I try.

Dr. Kaplan: Yeah, sure. Hey, this has been a great conversation. I know I threw a lot at you and it’s late at night for you in Ireland, so I appreciate your perseverance here and willingness to talk with me. Thanks so much for coming in and meeting me online.

Dr. Dwyer: No problem, Aaron. Thank you.