---
title: "Methodology"
description: "How the exercises on this site are written, sourced, and corrected."
last_updated: "2026-08-02"
---

# Methodology

How the exercises on this site are written, sourced, and corrected.

## How exercises are built

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Every explanation states why the correct answer is correct and why each attractive wrong answer fails — not just which letter to pick.
4. Citations, where included, link to primary sources: peer-reviewed journals, university publications, or canonical academic books. Never to secondary blog summaries.
5. 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

Claims resting on empirical research link to a primary source: a peer-reviewed journal article, a university publication, or a canonical academic book. Secondary blog summaries are not cited. Statistics appear only when traceable to the work that produced them. Where evidence is genuinely contested, the page says so rather than presenting a 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. Send the URL, the specific claim, and why you think it is wrong to editorial@criticalthinkingexercise.org.

## Sitemap

See the full [sitemap](https://www.criticalthinkingexercise.org/sitemap.md) for all pages.