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This blog relates to my April 22nd, 2025 post, “Develop Intellectual Humility.”
It is very easy to be overly confident in your beliefs, especially when unaware or in denial of the ever-present possibility that you may be wrong, and even more so if you live in a culture that encourages false bravado and the constant pretense of knowing more than you do. When people are unable or disinclined to accurately distinguish what they know from what they don’t, yet at the same time perceive themselves as correct in all their beliefs, they are exhibiting cognitive arrogance, or in other words, cognitive pretense. This is, as with other cognitive vices, a significant problem in human life.
All people at times believe themselves to know more than they do. Even experts make this mistake. The danger in this can be seen in such cases as people predictably dying while engaged in certain forms of extreme sports, despite their absolute confidence that they could handle the severe conditions safely.
Cognitive arrogance connects with hypocrisy. Think of typical job-interview advice that discourages people from acknowledging ways in which they need significant improvement, instead encouraging them to exclusively discuss and even exaggerate their strengths. Whoever follows such advice would likely bemoan being deceived about their supervisor’s characteristics and skills, yet might still attempt to rationalize their own dishonesty.
Look at how far some individuals go in the professional or political arenas by misrepresenting their knowledge and abilities—not only to others, but to themselves. People may get away with these prevarications for years without getting caught. Or they may not. Either way, living a life of dishonestly leads only to sham psychological wellness at best, never to authentic mental health.
Consider these questions:
Remember that in any situation, you can ask, “What do I know right now for certain? What do I think is true, but may not be true? What do I need to question about my beliefs in this context?” In some situations, these questions are not only useful, but vital.
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This blog is adapted from pages 179 & 180 of Critical Thinking Therapy: For Happiness & Self-Actualization (2025), L. Elder, Foundation for Critical Thinking Press. Copies can be ordered at FCTPress.Org.
Comment in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online
Jan 13, 2026
with Kenneth R. Adamson
Abstract
In this paper, originally prepared as a result of an Anti-Defamation League conference on Critical Thinking and Prejudice, Paul and Adamson argue that there are seven basic flaws in “traditional research into the nature of prejudice.” Efforts in prejudice reduction, based on traditional research, tend to merely reshape and redirect prejudice rather than to lessen it. This research problem originated in the failure of theoreticians to take seriously the groundbreaking work of William Graham Sumner in Folkways (1906). Sumner developed the view that prejudice is the norm rather than the exception in everyday belief formation. His concept ties in well with Piaget’s research into egocentrism and sociocentrism of thought.
Only a well-conceived critical education, Paul and Adamson argue, “an education that cultivates the rationality of students. . . . liberates students from modes of thinking that limit their potential and narrow their perspective” lessens “the natural drive toward prejudice.” For Paul and Adamson, “prejudice is a rich, complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon, grounded in . . . the primary, instinctual nature of human thinking.” Removing it “requires the development of our secondary, more latent, nature, our capacity to develop as fairminded, rational persons.” Such an emphasis “should not focus on the content of particular prejudices . . . but on the mechanisms of prejudice and their role in the struggle for power, advantage, and money.” The authors conclude: “A credible program of prejudice reduction ought not focus on the prejudices of others, prejudices against us, for we are ideally situated to gauge our own mode of thinking, not to change the thinking of others.”
Introduction
Traditional research into the nature of prejudice has these seven basic flaws: 1) Researchers tend to approach prejudice as an aberration, something abnormal or atypical, something outside the normal mechanisms of thought, desire, and action — in palpable contrast to the main source, direction, and nature of human cognitive and affective life. 2) They tend to emphasize the dysfunctional nature of prejudice, to ignore the many advantages in power, wealth, status, and peace of mind that come from prejudiced states of mind. 3) They tend to focus on negative prejudices, "prejudices-against," and assume that positive prejudices, prejudices-for, are independent of negative ones and largely benign. 4) They play down or ignore prejudices against belief systems and ideologies, as though prejudices were only against people as such. 5) They fail to emphasize how prejudice is embedded in the pervasive problem of everyday human irrationality. 6) They tend to focus on the content of prejudices, rather than on the mode of thinking generating them. 7) They fail to recognize that significant prejudice reduction requires long-term strategies for developing fair and openminded persons in fair and openminded societies.
We emphasize, in contrast, the . . .
Continue Reading & Comment in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online
Jan 06, 2026
This blog relates to my May 27th, 2025 post, “Develop Intellectual Empathy.”
We all know that there are people who, instead of being able to understand and empathize with other people’s thoughts and experiences, are chiefly trapped within their own respective points of view (displaying narrowmindedness). They are unwilling to consider any reasoning except their own. They are unable to enter others’ viewpoints and learn from them. They are unable to read and gain deep and transformative ideas from literature worthy of their attention; they are often unaware even of what literature warrants their attention. They see everything according to their limited vision, leaving their mental space highly constricted. They are therefore unable to actively internalize ideas beyond, or contrary to, those they already harbor and cherish. They feel a need to maintain their existing beliefs to feel secure, even though they have rarely (if ever) examined those beliefs honestly and objectively. In short, they are largely narrowminded.
It should be easy to see how narrowmindedness leads to mental suffering. Here are some questions that can help you probe your mind for this intellectual vice:
Continue Reading & Comment in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online
