Editorial
Methodology
How the exercises on this site are written, sourced, and corrected.
A site that teaches people to ask for reasoning owes them its own. This page states how the material here is produced, what counts as an acceptable source, and what happens when something turns out to be wrong.
By Tajammal MaqboolFounder & Developer
How exercises are built
- Each exercise starts from a real situation where the reasoning error actually occurs, not from a textbook example, so the pattern is recognizable outside the page.
- Distractor options are written to be genuinely tempting. An item that everyone gets right teaches nothing, so wrong answers are drafted to capture the specific misunderstanding the question is testing.
- Every explanation states why the correct answer is correct and why each attractive wrong answer fails — not just which letter to pick.
- Citations, where included, link to primary sources: peer-reviewed journals, university publications, or canonical academic books. Never to secondary blog summaries.
- Content is revised when I find an error or the literature moves. Corrections sent by readers are acted on and are the highest-value mail this site gets.
Editorial principles
Practice over exposition
Critical thinking is a skill, not a body of knowledge. Reading about fallacies does not make you spot them; doing exercises does. Every page here is built around active practice rather than passive reading.
Sources over assertion
Where a claim rests on research, the research is named and linked. Where the evidence is contested, the page says so rather than presenting a false consensus.
Transparent reasoning
Every question includes a full explanation that walks through the reasoning. Showing the working is the whole point of a site about thinking.
Free and accessible
All content is free, with no account required. No advertising, no user-data sales, no paid tier behind the free one.
Sourcing standard
Where a claim rests on empirical research, it is linked to a primary source: a peer-reviewed journal article, a university publication, or a canonical academic book. Secondary blog summaries are not cited, because a summary is a claim about a study rather than the study itself, and the distortion introduced in between is exactly the kind of thing this site teaches people to catch.
Statistics are held to the same rule. A number appears here only when it can be traced to the work that produced it. Where no such source is at hand, the claim is dropped rather than softened into something vaguer that sounds supported but is not.
Where the evidence is genuinely contested — and in cognitive science a good deal of it is, including several well-known effects whose replication record is weaker than their popularity suggests — the page says so rather than presenting a settled consensus that does not exist.
What this site does not claim
My background is engineering, not academic philosophy or cognitive science, and I'm careful about that line. I make no claim to be a researcher in either field, and nothing here is a substitute for a formal course. What I can promise is that every exercise states its reasoning in full, every claim that needs a source gets one, and anything I'm unsure about is marked as unsettled rather than smoothed over.
Corrections
Errors get fixed and the fix gets described. If a question is ambiguous, an explanation is wrong, or a source does not support what it is cited for, that is worth knowing about — reader corrections are the highest-value mail this site receives, and they are acted on rather than filed.
The most useful correction includes the URL, the specific claim, and why you think it is wrong. Send it to editorial@criticalthinkingexercise.org or use the contact form.