Critical thinking and the end(s) of psychology

Critical thinking always involves logical and metacognitive skills. However, different modes of thinking critically with regard to psychology evince diverse sensibilities, that is, different ways of envisioning what might be wrong with a project or approach and how it could be improved. Fostering critical thinking thus is about developing distinctive modes of responsiveness and discernment, of which there can be more than one type. Literature on critical thinking for psychologists can be parsed into several ideal types. Critical-thinking-in-psychology texts display a sensibility that accords great legitimacy and status to forms of psychological inquiry that emulate a certain vision of the natural sciences, as well as what Max Weber called formal rationality. Texts that advocate “critical thinking about psychology” or identify themselves as “critical psychology” all argue that psychologists need to analyze and challenge fundamental assumptions that usually go unquestioned in the conventional literature, but they also diverge significantly from one another. They generally embody one or more of four distinctive sensibilities: experiential, relational, emancipatory-activist, or emancipatory-ironic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)