Thinking about the last post got me wondering if anyone besides myself regularly covers forms of irrationality that are studied in the social sciences in their Critical Thinking or Informal Logic classes. It seems to me to be important for students to know about things like the endowment effect, the bandwagon effect, confirmation bias, framing problems, and groupthink (among others). These irrational tendencies in persons and others like them certainly present obstacles to critical thinking that (we hope) can be mitigated to at least some degree by the concepts and techniques we teach. And yet there’s not exactly a huge volume of literature bringing together critical thinking and the empirical study of phenomena like these.
What place, if any, does teaching about the empirical study of irrationality have in your overall pedagogy? Do you think it should have a place in the study of critical thinking, or should we be content to let the scientists work on it? Is it even reasonable to think that training in critical thinking help prevent these kinds of irrationality? If you do include presentations about the forms of irrationality studied by psychology, economics, &c., how do you do it?
RAIL 
Over the years, I find myself including, bit by bit, more and more about irrationality and critical thinking in my writing courses. I’ve mined all sorts of wonderful little discussion items from Robert Levine’s The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold, and I’m currently reading Thomas Gilovich’s fascinating How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. As I read, I keep having those “a-ha, this will be great in class!” moments.
In a roundabout way, I have your blog to thank for leading me to Gilovich’s text. When I read your post several days ago, I perused ‘confirmation bias’ and the ‘endowment effect’ in various online databases, eventually actually getting up out of my office chair and, horror, *walking* over to the campus library to browse some titles on the shelves. So thanks for the motivator!
Happy to have been of some service! The Gilovich book sounds interesting. I’ll have to see if I can locate a copy here. Thanks for the tip!
Great points and questions. I personally am a grad student working in computational argumentation, so I don’t have enough experience in critical thinking education to have an informed opinion.
But I do appreciate your questions and your points. I think that these results from the social sciences fit quite naturally with the study of argumentation.
I think they do too. One of the things I like about argumentation theory in general is its long-standing openness to interdisciplinary collaboration. The work going on now in the social sciences around rationality (and some of the work in brain science and associated forms of psychology too) are well worth the attention of argumentation theorists. I think it is very important for us to keep the empirical in mind even as we work on what primarily are normative projects.