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Feb 26, 2026
This blog relates to my March 3, 2025, post, “Do You Embody Intellectual Perseverance or Do You Easily Give Up?”
When people are unwilling to persevere through difficulties in problem-solving and easily quit when faced with complexities in working through issues or projects, they exhibit irrational laziness. Its opposite, intellectual perseverance, is required for effectively addressing challenges that arise as you develop your mind.
The mind, being habitual by nature, is often loath to change. Exceptions arise when either the mind realizes it must change to get something it wants badly enough in a given context, or – preferably – when it has learned to value and develop habits of self-reflection and self-discipline.
Nothing is easier than giving up when faced with difficulties. Those who prevail in life are not those who lack any challenges to work through, but those who persist through the challenges they do face. This is true because achieving anything of value entails the endurance of complexities that require the mind to develop new skills and/or habits. This can only be done through deliberation, practice, and a willingness to work through confusions, perplexities, uncertainties, and frustrations with equanimity.
To be generally effective and mentally well requires facing and addressing patterns of quitting in thinking and life. You can never realize your capacities if giving up is a common pattern for you; you can never have a healthy relationship if you cannot tolerate disagreement and reasonable critique; you will struggle to complete important projects if you collapse under the pressures typically entailed by them.
In terms of intellectual perseverance, some people are naturally . . .
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Feb 19, 2026
The Concept of Prejudice
The English word "prejudice" derives from the Latin stems pre meaning "before" and judicium meaning "judgment" or "sentence." Literally speaking, therefore, it means "judging or sentencing before the evidence has been considered." Its early recorded uses link it conceptually to injury, detriment, hurt, loss, or damage caused to persons by a judgment or action in which their rights were disregarded.
From the earliest uses one finds the word and its grammatical cognates used with conceptual connections to the affective and the behavioral as well as to the cognitive. Consider the following entries from the Oxford English Dictionary:
1. a judgment formed before due examination or consideration; a premature or hasty judgment…
2. the action of judging an event beforehand
3. preconceived opinion; bias or leaning favorable or unfavorable
4. a feeling, favorable or unfavorable, toward any person or thing, prior to or not based on actual experience; a prepossession; a bias or leaning toward one side; an unreasoning predilection or objection
5 a preconceived idea as to what will happen
6. to affect injuriously or unfavorably by doing some act, or as a consequence of something done
7. to injure materially; to damage
Words with equivalent historical roots exist in French (préjugé), German (Vorurteil), Portuguese (preconceito), and other European languages. Each essentially refers to the human capacity to form prejudgments and preconceptions without adequate reason or before the relevant evidence is in, then to feel and act accordingly to the detriment of others. This core of meaning implies that people can be prejudiced in any dimension of thought, feeling, or action, not only with respect to...
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Feb 12, 2026
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 . . .
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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:
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