When it comes to critical thinking, we are at the mercy of our brain’s own psychological predispositions, which make us naturally poor at thinking impartially. Confirmation bias encourages us to favour patterns and discount new information; truth bias makes us assume everything is true; and the illusory truth effect makes us poor at indexing information, meaning we’ll start to believe something is true, even if we know that it is false.

What’s more, the more times we encounter information, the more we believe it, and even when we practice being sceptical, our brains assume the worst and make us overcompensate in our fact-checking, making it hard to identify what is and isn’t real. Add to these predispositions the influence of the opinions and values we already hold, and we’re a melting pot of ideas that totally prevent impartiality. We’re also susceptible to outside influence, and naturally seek out individuals or groups with ideas that complement our own; the beginnings of groupthink.

When it seems that even our brains are against us, our potential saviour comes in the form of critical thinking. Specifically focussed on improving our ability to think impartially, rationally, and analytically, and to slow down our thought processing to become more effective, critical thinking has a direct impact on our mental capability, particularly when it comes to external influence. It is, and should be, the first line of defence in identifying fake news and propaganda, helping prevent the development of extremist views, and ultimately fostering an improved understanding of the information we consume. It also helps reduce our susceptibility to coercion and manipulation.

A novel approach to critical thinking is to emulate the mathematical approach to equations, which utilise inversion to problem-solve. For mathematicians, it is second nature to invert an equation to make it easier to solve, aligning all information of one type, on one side of the equation. It’s what helps to calculate “x” and is a method of showing your working, which encourages slower more deliberate thinking.

While that makes sense for calculating x/y, the question is how can it apply to much more complex subjects? Subjects that are anything but linear, infinitely complex, and which can have any number of attributes and conflicting facts. Well, it’s not so much the pure mathematical approach that we need to apply, but the principle of what it is and what it represents.

Inversion thinking can be applied to any amount of information, and the purpose is to encourage us to deliberately approach information in a contrary way. By specifically imagining an alternative scenario, playing devil’s advocate, seeking out conflicting or alternative sources and viewpoints, and actively challenging our own, it makes us far better able to determine fact from fiction and recognise our own bias in how we process and rationalise information. Our goal with this form of critical thinking is not necessarily to reach an answer, but to be sure that we have considered something from multiple angles, and challenged our own perceptions about what is fact and what is fiction. The result should be better quality decision-making and more informed understanding, but this should not be the primary goal when practising critical thinking.

We encourage the rule of five as an approach to lateral reading, the perfect instigator of the inversion approach. Lateral reading encourages the breadth rather than depth of reading, promoting that you seek multiple resources, and filter common facts from opinions across multiple resources. In turn, the rule of five helps practise lateral thinking, by actively tasking you with finding:

• Two sources of information that you are comfortable or familiar with, preferably across two different mediums, for example, article and video
• Two sources of information that you are definitely not comfortable or familiar with, preferably ones that directly contradict or challenge your own viewpoints
• A source of information that has a very specific, niche, or strong opinion on the matter

The purpose of seeking out multiple sources of information is that it allows you to identify commonalities (points that persist in all formats); challenge your own bias by directly contradicting them; and help you to identify flaws in your own arguments or reasoning. It encourages you to actively practise critical thinking, in turn making you better at it, and it makes you less susceptible to exploitation, manipulation, and misinformation, all of which are rife in a society where we consume so much content.