Teaching Students to Think Critically about… Conspiracy Theories!

We want future citizens to be more thoughtful before accepting conspiracy theories. It’s not that all conspiracy theories are wrong. Some are likely to be true. But we need to be very careful about accepting any conspiracy theories, since many of them are bogus. One way to teach students to be more skeptical is to use a procedure similar to Bayesian analysis. In the following lessons, students are given conspiracy theories that were afloat during the given time period, and are asked to choose a percentage based on how confident they are that each conspiracy theory is true. Then they get some guidelines to reconsider and recalculate their percentage choices based on these new guidelines. Finally, they get evidence from primary and secondary sources in regard to the conspiracy claims, and are asked to recalculate their percentage choices again in light of evidence.

If we can train students to think about toolkit guidelines and to look for evidence in order to tentatively evaluate conspiracy theories, that will be a worthwhile accomplishment, indeed! People simply don’t have the time and energy to go into great depth on every conspiracy theory that they hear. What students need is a few guidelines that will help them separate the more realistic from the more fanciful conspiracy theories. And they need the experience of analyzing conspiracy theories using evidence. See my Guides to Teaching Critical Thinking for more ideas on teaching skepticism to students.