Audio long read: How to stay smart in the age of AI — the science of critical thinking

Benjamin Thompson (0:02)

This is an audio long read from Nature. In this episode, How to Stay Smart in the Age of AI, The Science of Critical Thinking, written by Helen Pearson and read by me, Benjamin Thompson.

Earlier this year, education researcher Li Xiangyan realized that students could outsource all of their work for his university course to artificial intelligence. Yen, who teaches at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, was using an agentic AI called Codex to set up an online course on a learning management platform. But it quickly became clear that the adept AI could independently complete all the assignments, answer questions, and participate in discussions. Quote, without the learner being intellectually engaged, end quote, at all, Yen says. The experience made Yen think that teaching students to reason and think for themselves, quote, is more critical than ever, he says. And he is hardly alone. In a 2025 survey of more than 1000 US faculty members conducted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, 90% said they thought that generative AI will reduce students' critical thinking skills. Around 20% of higher education students who use AI said that they already find it harder to work through problems without it, according to more than 8000 respondents to a global survey this year. Learning happens as a consequence of cognitive processing. Cognitive processing is typically effortful, and that's what AI effectively removes, says cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Quote, people are really worried about that, end quote. And science, in which people need to critically evaluate theories and data, is one important area that's under threat from the AI revolution in large language models, or LLMs. There is a risk that students outsource precisely the activities through which scientific thinking develops, formulating hypotheses, interpreting evidence, considering alternatives, and struggling with uncertainty, says Thomas Nygren, who studies education and critical thinking at Uppsala University in Sweden. But all is not lost. Specialists in education and cognition have been studying critical thinking and how to develop it for years, and some have useful tips on how to stay cognitively sharp in the age of AI.

The building of critical thinking and higher order thinking skills have become even more important, says Stéphane Vincent-Lancran, who led a 10-year programme on critical thinking of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, in Paris.

Ask five people to define critical thinking, and you'll get five different replies. Quote, critical thinking is sort of the pinnacle, end quote, of human cognition, says Willingham. Quote, it's kind of a basket term that captures instances in which people are thinking well, end quote.

One reason for the very definitions is that the term is used widely in education and everyday discourse, but less by researchers who study cognition. Instead, they talk of separate high-level processes such as memory, reasoning, decision-making, and problem-solving, which involve differing but overlapping mechanisms in the brain. Some general strategies are common in critical thinking, say researchers. An important one is the ability to consider alternative possibilities or perspectives to our own, as a scientist would when weighing up different hypotheses.

But practicing critical thinking requires skills and knowledge in the relevant domain. So, being able to do it in one field doesn't mean someone can in another. Neurologists, for example, are not particularly good at diagnosing cardiology cases, as one study showed. Concerns that students are intellectually under par are not new. In 1983, a report by the US. National Commission on Excellence in Education warned that many 17-year-olds lacked quote, the higher-order intellectual skills we should expect of them, end quote. Over the past few decades, critical thinking has become a goal in many education systems, says Vincent L'Encran. It is now considered an educational priority by the United Nations Cultural Organization, UNESCO, and is part of school curricula in almost all OECD countries. He points to the example of a course in which students investigate the causes of type 2 diabetes, revising their ideas as they learn about different perspectives, such as the contributions of genes and environmental influences to the disease. But this doesn't mean the goal is being met. Quote, there is not much reason to think we were doing a fabulous job, end quote, of teaching critical thinking in the past, says Willingham gloomily. Quote, and now AI has come in and wrecked everything that we had achieved, end quote, for students today. Teachers in schools and universities are brimming with stories of students who, they say, are poor at problem solving and evaluating information themselves, because they're outsourcing the work to AI. And some research supports the idea that AI can erode skills. A 2024 study found that secondary school students were better at solving mathematics problems when given access to a ChatGPT like generative AI. But after it was taken away, they performed worse than those who never had access to the tool. Overall, research does not yet show clearly what impact generative AI is having on learning and critical thinking. This is because AI tools are relatively new and varied. The studies so far are conflicting, and too few rigorous or long-term studies have been done, researchers say. Tools can help, but can also have a negative effect, says Yen, who has assessed the literature. Quote, it's actually in both directions, end quote.