Are you curious whether critical thinking training could help you or your organization? Whether you'd like to critically analyse a decision, practice with critical conversations or learn practical skills that can help you evaluate information, there are many ways to put critical thinking to use.

I can teach workshops across the Netherlands, both in Dutch and English. If you're interested, just use the below scheduler to book an appointment so that I can discuss what I could do for you. Below is a list of workshops and lectures that I've taught in the past.

Workshops

Critical conversations

Nobody knows your organization like you and the people you work with, least of all me. This is why I can't just visit your offices and hand you substantive criticism. What I can do instead is show you how you can have critical conversations with team members and others in your organisation, about the decisions you are facing now.

Using a structured format that is informed by the latest development in the psychology of reasoning, you and your team will learn to make precise statements, question assumptions and avoid faulty reasoning and cognitive biases.

Analysing expert opinions

We live in a world filled with specialists, who are ready to advise us on the basis of their expertise. While it is good to hear their thoughts (after all, they didn't become experts without hard work and a lot of thinking), deferring to their authority is not always helpful for your decision-making. After all, what do you do when different experts provide you with conflicting opinions?

In this workshop, you will learn two key skills for dealing with expert knowledge: plausibility checking and argument mapping. Combined, these two skills prepare you for critical, effective communication with experts.

Towards critical organizations

Often, decisions are not made at the individual level. Instead, organizations as a whole "think things through" and adapt to changing circumstances. Looking at organizations as cognitive machines will also allow you to identify ways in which this machine can be more critical. That means questioning assumptions, seeing new perspectives and reflecting on existing habits.

How to be mindful of cognitive biases

Human reasoning is prone to errors. We overestimate small risks, prefer new information that confirms what we already believe and tend to imitate successful people without much consideration for the causes of their success. In this workshop, you will learn to recognize the cognitive biases that are most likely to affect professional decisions, as well as some techniques you can use to steer clear of them.

Lectures

Thinking together

In this lecture, I summarize research findings about the quality of thinking, showing work on cognitive biases, misinformation and conspiracy thinking. I argue that thinking is best understood as a social, not an individual effort and that thinking together is often better than thinking alone. I also discuss the limits of this social approach, with a special emphasis on motivated reasoning, myside bias and groupthink.

What we (don't) know about conspiracy believers

Why do some people give so much credence to conspiratorial explanations?  A wide range of disciplines, from political science and sociology to psychology and philosophy, have been pondering this question. In this talk, I summarize the work done on this topic and some of the gaps that are remaining. I will also explore whether conspiracy theorizing is a consequence of too little or too much critical thinking.