Smart Idiots and Brave Thinkers: Rethinking Critical Thinking
Is courage the missing ingredient for successful critical thinking, and why is critical thinking still one of the most critical skills for every human? As we start to explore critical thinking, it’s a term that’s thrown around as loosely as leadership or integrity, but it is very much worth examining and understanding. Not only is it important today, as it always has been, but it will very likely be even more important in your future. I will explain why, and also break critical thinking down into fundamental elements that are all important. The pathway to improving critical thinking is in improving the ingredients.
So, before we jump to why, the four ingredients that I’m going to focus on are the cognitive ability or the intelligence, which is the engine that drives critical thinking. That is supported by the breadth and depth of knowledge, whether domain-specific or not. The third ingredient is emotional intelligence and your ability to self-regulate through decision-making, which acts as the steering for your critical thinking. And lastly is the courage and the will to think critically. And this last element is, to be honest, a subset of emotional intelligence. However, it is worth calling out as a separate ingredient, because without it, all the fundamental aspects of critical thinking and independence get washed away. Now, why is improving our critical thinking so important?
Daniel Kahneman, the famous Nobel laureate in economics, said, “We think, each of us, that we’re much more rational than we are.” This points out that our ability to reason is one of the keys to self-improvement and to navigating the complexities of life despite our own flaws, yet despite our opportunities to practice, we may not be as good as we believe.
If we also consider the stakes of critical thinking, this is much of what Thomas Jefferson referred to when he said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” While those are both high ideals, there are also practical purposes behind critical thinking, including the idea of employment.
The Hart Research Associates 2018 Employer Survey found that 78% identified critical thinking and analytic reasoning as the most important skill they seek in employees. Furthermore, the National Association of Colleges and Employers Job Outlook Surveys found in 2023 that 28% of respondents ranked critical thinking as the single most important competency, and in 2025, 96.1% of employers rated it as important. The American Association of Colleges and Universities’ employer research showed that 93% of employers value critical thinking more than a university degree, which demonstrates a reflection of today’s shift from checkbox hiring to skills-based hiring.
So critical thinking has always been important, from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson to getting a job today. But in the future, it’s likely to continue to be even more important.
As social media has increased, the ability to discern what’s real, what’s fake, and what’s exaggerated is much more difficult. Misinformation campaigns, whether by an individual or by a state, have become commonplace, with bad actors in Russia once generating both sides of competing protests in a Texas town without ever setting foot on the ground themselves.
Going forward, in an AI-based world, the ability to think for yourself and think critically both around the inputs and outputs from AI may become one of the most essential human skills that separates us from the raw intelligence of AI. This is perhaps one of the key moments where raw intelligence is surpassed by AI, and therefore may be one of the least important elements of critical thinking, although we certainly shouldn’t throw it away in the process.
Cognitive Ability: the driving engine
Let’s turn to those four ingredients and start with that cognitive ability. The cognitive ability is the engine that drives things. This is your intelligence. It’s what powers your ability for critical thinking. There is no question that it is insufficient, but it is still what allows you to process what you’re absorbing, to consider more than one variable at a time, and to find new connections and new insights out of a complex world of information. I won’t focus a lot on why it’s important, as it’s fairly obvious, but we’ll highlight some of its gaps.
Diane Halpern, author of Thought and Knowledge, states, “A high IQ is not always an indicator of good critical judgment, since sometimes people with high intelligence are not exempt from biases or rigid thoughts.” That’s what makes these other variables and ingredients so vitally important.
Furthermore, intelligence has some catches that we have to watch out for. The idea of motivated reasoning indicates that highly intellectual people are better at rationalizing their biases. Therefore, while biased, they can create a sound argument supporting that bias, which can fundamentally turn them into what we can endearingly call a smart idiot. So while making people smarter sounds good, we don’t want to end up with a world of smart idiots!
So having a powerful engine can be very valuable. But as anybody who’s driven a sports car can tell you, a powerful engine is not enough. So let’s turn our attention to knowledge.
Knowledge: the navigational map
Knowledge is our navigational map through the world of critical thinking. This begins with domain knowledge in the topic that we’re applying critical thinking within. Understanding the variables, the cause and effect connections, the systems dynamics, and the historical patterns for any topic (whether geopolitical, physical, strategic, or even simply human) is a key ingredient for critical thinking. For example, conspiracy theories are primarily believed by those who lack domain knowledge in the conspiracy domain to understand why it couldn’t possibly be true.
It is, of course, important to recognize that no domain has completed its development of the knowledge base, as science continues to unveil new insights and new understanding of the universe. Most recently, the James Webb Telescope, which I discussed with its Program Director on this podcast, was launched and led to new insights about how the universe works.
Therefore, domain knowledge will never be complete, but the most effective critical thinkers leverage both the existing critical knowledge, as well as holding space for both new discovery and unwinding past assumptions that may no longer be valid.
Beyond domain knowledge, there’s also breadth of knowledge. The book Range demonstrates very clearly the value of a broad knowledge base. The ability to cross over domains can lead to creative thinking, new insights, as well as simply a broader understanding of how the interconnected world works. The book helps us understand the value of generalists who understand many domains, while not discounting the value of specialists with deep domain expertise.
It’s important, therefore, for critical thinking that we read, we study, we learn. This does not mean a college degree, although a college degree has been used as a proxy for having learned certain things. But as the quote from Good Will Hunting demonstrates, that same knowledge is available for $1.50 in late charges at your local library. It’s the pursuit of that knowledge that is the key, by any means you pursue it.
This is one of the places where AI can provide us access to more knowledge. This will allow more people to engage in critical thinking if they learn how to both utilize AI to gain access to previously inaccessible knowledge, but also enough domain expertise to discern whether what they’re reading is sound or not. I, for example, found both the Diane Halpern quote and the Thomas Jefferson quote by using AI tools to do research on this subject.
I also discovered this useful quote from Anatole France: “An education isn’t how much you’ve committed to memory or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” Which means the value of the persistent pursuit of expanding our knowledge is a perpetual and worthwhile pursuit.
Emotional Intelligence: hands on the steering wheel
Considering emotional intelligence, Christopher Dwyer states, “If the impact of emotion on thinking is one of the biggest barriers to critical thinking, as I believe it is, then the ability to self-regulate your thinking in a manner that accounts for such potential impacts is of utmost importance. This is because the existence of biases is not related to intelligence. Biases are often based on other factors, such as dopamine, where the confirmation bias allows us to feel good that we were right all along, and can trick us into a false interpretation of observable facts.
This is why emotional intelligence is the steering that helps us navigate our engine through the map of knowledge. It helps us dampen, although not eliminate, our biases. It allows us to stay with a question longer through the chasm from not knowing to finding answers. That can be a very uncomfortable place to be, knowing that knowledge is needed or knowing that a conclusion is needed. It takes restraint not to quickly wrap things up but to stay with discomfort.
This is why most effective problem-solving is designed to slow us down and to force us to think more deliberately and critically, because our instinct is to rush to that conclusion, to check the box, and to close the door. But staying with the problem longer, through a series of steps (as I write about in my book People Solve Problems), is what allows us to dig deeper and uncover new insights, new ideas, and new solutions.
Aristotle states, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” This means that we can examine all sides of an argument and examine solutions that are clearly not going to solve our problem, to be curious about what aspects of those are useful, insightful, important, or informative. This is how we understand the other side of an equation. This is how we understand the other side of an argument. This is how we process bad news (whether we got a bad performance review or were fired, or had someone give us a bad review on a speech or a book). We allow that information that may hurt or sting to be examined and understood, and leveraged for future benefit.
I rediscovered recently and wrote about in this blog post this quote from John F. Kennedy in his commencement speech at Yale University in 1962:
“For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie (deliberate, contrived, and dishonest), but the myth (persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic). Too often, we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. Thinking requires effort and responsibility. This means that the prejudices of the present must not be allowed to obscure the truth of the past, nor must we ever assume that the truth is necessarily in the middle of opposing viewpoints, nor must we see merit in both sides of a question simply because they are opposed, nor must we expect that the truth will always be found by splitting the difference between two opposite ideas.”
As we deploy emotional intelligence within our critical thinking, one of those important elements is empathy, which is a key idea for understanding opposing viewpoints. I wrote about the idea of rigorous empathy here, with the idea that it allows us to truly understand someone’s path, experience, and context. That rigorous empathy does not forfeit your freedom to draw your own conclusions and to think critically, but as a tool of more deeply understanding.
Another dimension of emotional intelligence is courage, but I decided here, as part of this framework, to extract courage as its own ingredient, as courage and will provide the fuel for critical thinking.
Courage: the fuel that powers us through
Indira Gandhi said it well: “You have to have courage, courage of different kinds. First, intellectual courage to sort out different values and make up your mind about which is the one which is right for you to follow. You have to have moral courage to stick up for that, no matter what comes in your way.” As she talks about intellectual courage, the idea is that you have a responsibility as well as an opportunity to decide things for yourself.
This begins with discarding identity based on ideas. Identity politics is a practice in which you belong to a broad set of ideas, which is a dangerous trap because you cannot discard one idea without discarding your identity. This leads to rigidity and zealotry, and sometimes dramatic outcomes from those traits.
Carl Jung wrote about this, interestingly, in the context of flying saucers in the 1950s, when there was mass hysteria around UFO sightings based on the Cold War. He wrote, “Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment.” This is what allows us to achieve a sense of belonging to a conclusion, but courage allows us to deconstruct that reality and sometimes swim upstream against what those around us believe. That takes courage.
Russ Payne wrote, “We live in an age where not having the right opinions can get you kicked out of your group. Many people would rather die than not belong.” This is where the courage is needed first to have independent thought through critical thinking, then further courage to give voice to that critical thinking, and further courage again to act on it.
At a smaller scale, yet equally important, because it occurs every day, courage is also required to muster the energy for critical thinking. Whether it applies to how we eat, or sleep, or work, or exercise, it is very easy to follow the path of least resistance. The idea of the cognitive miser wants us to preserve our mental energy for when we need it most, but each of those moments where we determine that we should be applying critical thinking means that moment, we must expend the mental energy.
In his book The Diary of a CEO, Steven Bartlett recounts a powerful lesson on the dangers of groupthink and the lack of courageous critical thinking through a story of a high-stakes meeting where a leader asked his team to rate a new idea. While Bartlett privately judged the pitch as a “1” out of 10, he watched as every colleague before him succumbing to the pressure of social conformity, unanimously praised it as a “10.” When the spotlight finally landed on him, the momentum of the room was so overwhelming that he found himself meekly echoing the “10” despite his internal conviction. This anecdote serves as a stark warning that without a culture of psychological safety, the desire for harmony will too often silence the courageous truth, leaving organizations blind to their most critical flaws.
In a famous product launch example, automotive legend Bob Lutz has said the Pontiac Aztek is what happens when internal momentum and deference beat honest feedback. The Aztek bombed in early market research with one respondent saying, “I wouldn’t take it as a gift,” yet the organization pushed ahead anyway. No one had the courage to either think critically about what they were doing, give voice to that thinking, or act on that viewpoint.
Whether that means taking the time, creating the environment, pushing off distractions, or sitting down with a pen and paper, the courage to do the hard work is a daily challenge, but a vitally important one if we are to deploy this most critical skill.
For reflection
Critical thinking is more than intelligence. Our cognitive abilities may provide the engine, and our access to knowledge (both retained and pursued) helps us navigate, and our emotional intelligence allows us to steer, but it is the daily courage that allows us to face the moment where critical thinking is important. And those moments happen every single day for every single person.
For self-improvement, don’t focus on developing critical thinking, but instead consider how you can cultivate each of the respective ingredients that make up critical thinking.