Last year, I tweeted a series of critical thinking quizzes, challenging people to detect logical fallacies and denialist techniques in false arguments. Confession time: these quizzes weren’t designed to be pedagogical. My goal was purely to test potential quiz questions to be used in an upcoming critical thinking smartphone game – it’s that game that will be the real pedagogical game, designed to be used in classrooms to teach critical thinking.
The quizzes achieved exactly what I needed – I obtained useful data and feedback, refining my quiz questions to be used in the Cranky Uncle game. In fact, I’ve already started to adapt a selection of quiz examples into cartoon fallacies, incorporating caricatures of donors of the Cranky Uncle crowdfunding campaign.
Nevertheless, people *did* find the quizzes instructive and educational. In fact, the response to the quizzes was so overwhelmingly positive, it made me realize just how powerful gamification was in engaging people on critical thinking about misinformation.
Right now, misinformation about COVID-19 is making people realize just how dangerous science misinformation can be. When people are misinformed about a scientific topic like infectious diseases, it can result in them behaving in ways that endanger themselves and their community. Building public resilience against misinformation is more important (and urgent) than ever.
How do we build public resilience against misinformation? Through inoculation – by raising awareness of the techniques used to mislead (like exposing a magician’s sleight of hand). Of course, increasing people’s critical thinking and teaching them the techniques of denial is hard work – how do we achieve that practically? As the public response to the fallacy quizzes show, a powerful way to do this is active inoculation – learn the techniques of denial through interactive exercises.
I’m posting the full list of fallacy quizzes here so that more people can practice detecting fallacies and hone their critical thinking skills. Here’s a killer tip – start at #1 then work your way through them sequentially. I start with a simple set of only 7 different denial techniques (FLICC + 2 other fallacies). By the 8th quiz, the list of denial techniques has expanded to a richer, more complicated taxonomy (and this taxonomy has only gotten more complicated ever since).
So here are the 8 fallacy quizzes:
- Quiz 1: http://sks.to/quiz1
- Quiz 2: http://sks.to/quiz2
- Quiz 3: http://sks.to/quiz3
- Quiz 4: http://sks.to/quiz4
- Quiz 5: http://sks.to/quiz5
- Quiz 6: http://sks.to/quiz6
- Quiz 7: http://sks.to/quiz7
- Quiz 8: http://sks.to/quiz8
Lastly, a reminder that I’ve already posted a summary of all the techniques of denial and definitions. And one more thing – sign up if you’d like to be notified of the latest developments of the Cranky Uncle game. Enjoy!
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