“Meltzoff & Cooper (2018). Critical thinking about research: Psychology and related fields.” - Article summary

People can get more polarized opinions after they have read the same article if they started off with opposing beliefs. This can be due to misinterpreting the evidence (1), different motivation (2) or other cognitive malfunctions (3).

Psychologists need to be critical thinkers, because they want to know the field and want to keep up with what is going on in the field of psychology.

Critical thinking requires to check for scientific soundness and not whether a paper matches with pre-existing beliefs, assumptions or other forms of bias. Scepticism of scientists towards their own work is valuable, as they then do not show the confirmation bias. There are several expectations a critical reader should have:

1. The research question flows naturally from the previous literature and the context.
2. The literature review and the statement of the problem relate to the hypotheses.
3. The hypotheses set up research design expectancies and suggest what variables should be manipulated, measured or controlled for.
4. The hypotheses, appropriate design and type of data dictate the method of data analysis.
5. The analysis influences the kind of conclusions, inferences and generalizations that can be made.