Transcription
We all want to think more clearly. We read [music] books, we watch videos, but how do you actually know if any of it's working? Well, over my more than 13 years as a peer-reviewed scholar and educator, I found that there is [music] an objective measure. In this video, I'm going to show you the one book that can measurably place you in the top 1% of critical thinkers, and I mean that statistically, [music] not just as marketing hype.
That book is the Watson-Glaser Test Practice Book by Exam Study Aids and Media. Now, that sounds boring, but hear me out. You see, this book is built around the most scientifically validated critical thinking assessment ever created, and I'm going to work through five of the key skills from this book with you and show you how to use them to outperform everyone around you.
So, let's start with the first of these five thinking skills this book trains, because it's the one people get wrong most often without ever realizing it: drawing inferences.
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Now, here's a scenario. You're sitting in a quarterly business review. In Q3, your company raised its prices by 15%. That same quarter, customer churn jumps from 4% to 7%. Now, a confident analyst stands up and says, "The price increase caused the churn."
Now, is that inference A, true; B, probably true; C, insufficient data; D, probably false; or E, false? Well, it feels true. In fact, it feels almost obvious. But, the disciplined answer is C, insufficient data, because all you actually have in front of you is two things that happened in the same 3-month window. You don't know what else changed during that quarter. A competitor may have launched an aggressive offer. There may have been a major service outage. It may be a seasonal pattern that happens every Q3.
Co-occurrence is not causation, and the entire skill of drawing inferences is about rating a claim precisely on a gradient from certainly true to certainly false, rather than collapsing everything into a binary of right or wrong. A strong critical thinker hears the price increase caused the churn and says, "That is a hypothesis worth testing, but not a conclusion I can confirm with what I currently have."
And think about how much rides on that small distinction in the real world. Entire strategies get reversed, prices get rolled back, and people's careers get derailed because someone treated a probably true or an insufficient data inference as though it were a hard fact. And so, this single discipline of rating your inferences honestly, instead of jumping to the most convenient one, is worth more in a professional setting than almost every other thinking habit you can build.
Now, the reason I can tell you that with such confidence is that this exact skill is one of five measured by the most scientifically validated critical thinking assessment ever created: the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal. And the book this video is built around, the Watson-Glaser Test Practice Book with its full set of questions, answers, and explanations, is designed entirely around training for it.
You see, the Watson-Glaser Test was originally developed by two psychologists at Columbia University, Goodwin Watson and Edward Glaser, and first published all the way back in 1925. It has been refined, re-normed, and re-validated continuously for over 85 years, which makes it the oldest, most widely used, and most heavily studied critical thinking test in the entire world.
In fact, it's used to hire and promote people at elite law firms, major corporations, and government agencies precisely because decades of peer-reviewed research show that performance on it predicts real-world professional success, especially in graduate-level and senior roles.
In addition, like any serious psychometric instrument, the Watson-Glaser is what is called norm-referenced. Your raw score is mapped against a very large population of previous test-takers and converted into a percentile rank, which means that if you actually train these five specific skills in this book until you can reliably score at the top of the scale, then by the literal definition of the norm tables, you sit at the top percentile of measured critical thinkers.
And so, let's continue to walk through all five skills, each with a real scenario you might just recognize from your own life. Now, we've covered the first skill, inferences. So, let's move to the second skill: recognizing assumptions.
An assumption is something taken for granted, the hidden foundation that a statement is silently resting on without ever stating it. And so, consider the following scenario. Your VP of sales declares with total confidence, "To hit next year's revenue target, we need to hire three more senior reps."
Proposed assumption: that the current team cannot hit the target at its existing capacity. Is that assumption being made, yes or no?
Well, a great tool you can use here is what's called the negation test, and it's the single most useful technique for this entire skill, and it works like this. You take the proposed assumption, you negate it, flip it to its exact opposite, and then you check whether the original statement still stands.
So, let's do it. Let's negate the assumption. The current team can hit the target at its existing capacity. Well, if that were true, then you would not need to hire anyone at all, and the VP's entire statement falls apart. Because negating the assumption destroys the argument, the assumption is unquestionably being made.
Now, contrast that with a different proposed assumption: that next year's target is higher than last year's. Well again, let's negate it. The target is the same as or lower than last year's. Now, does the VP's statement then fall apart? No, it doesn't. You might still need three more reps because of attrition or a more competitive market or longer onboarding times. The statement survives the negation in this instance, which tells you that this assumption is not actually required by the argument.
And so, that's the entire discipline here. A genuine assumption is what you might consider load-bearing. Pull it out and the whole structure comes down. In real meetings, train yourself to listen for the load-bearing assumption that nobody is saying out loud because that unspoken foundation is exactly where the most important decisions can catastrophically go wrong.
Spotting assumptions, however, then goes hand in hand with our third skill here: deductive reasoning. And this is where even genuinely brilliant people often get tripped up without noticing it.
You see, deduction asks one strict question: Does the conclusion follow necessarily from the premises using only the premises themselves and nothing imported from your own outside knowledge?
Well, let's explore the following scenario. Your company runs a leadership development program, and you're given two facts to treat as true.
Fact one: Every employee who completed the leadership program was promoted within two years.
Fact two: Maria was promoted within two years.
Proposed conclusion: Maria completed the leadership program.
Now, does that conclusion follow? It feels airtight, but hey, it's not. In fact, this is a textbook logical error called affirming the consequent. You see, the premise tells you that completing the program leads to promotion, but it doesn't tell you that promotion happens only through the program. After all, Maria could have been promoted for any number of reasons. She closed an enormous deal, she transferred into a fast-growing team, or she's simply exceptional at her job. The logical arrow only points in one direction, but the conclusion is trying to run that arrow in reverse. So, it just does not follow, full stop.
And the real-world version of this exact error is absolutely everywhere once you start looking. For instance, every successful founder I know is relentlessly obsessed. This person is relentlessly obsessed, so they're going to be a successful founder. Yet, this again simply doesn't follow. Yet, how common is this kind of reasoning? From what I've seen, way too common.
And so, deductive discipline means refusing, every single time, to let an argument secretly reverse a one-way implication. And the reason this skill is so valuable is that these reversed arrows are almost invisible in fast-moving conversation. They slide right past most people because the conclusion sounds plausible, and often is coming from someone who sounds very confident about it. But the person who can catch them in real time is the person who stops a room from making a decision built on a fundamental logical mistake.
And by the way, if you want to work with me personally to develop all the skills I discuss in this video and more, then feel free to check out my Critical Thinking Academy at the link in the pinned comment below.
So, once you've built these first three skills, you're truly ready for our fourth skill that the book trains you on: interpreting information, or in other words, deciding whether a given conclusion follows beyond reasonable doubt from a specific set of data that you've been handed. This is what you might consider the dashboard skill. And if you work with numbers in any capacity, it is the one that will rescue you most often.
So, let's explore the following scenario. A slide in the quarterly board deck reads, "Our email channel converts at 25%, the highest of any channel we have. Paid search converts at just 8%." And so, the proposed conclusion is, "We should shift budget out of paid search and into email."
Does that conclusion follow? See, it's enormously tempting, and yet it does not follow because a conversion rate all by itself tells you absolutely nothing about volume, scalability, or cost per acquisition. For instance, email might be converting at 25% precisely because it's going to a small, warm list of people who are already your loyal customers. A list that physically cannot be scaled up without destroying the very intimacy that makes it convert in the first place. Meanwhile, paid search at 8% might be reaching thousands of brand new buyers who would otherwise never have discovered you at all. The 25% is a real number, but the conclusion smuggles in three or four assumptions the data never actually supported.
And so, interpreting information well means asking relentlessly and sometimes unglamorously: Does this evidence genuinely support this specific conclusion, or does it only match a much smaller and maybe a more boring one? And you see, this gap between what the data actually show and what people confidently claim they show is exactly where people make some of the biggest career and business mistakes.
And the fifth and final skill rounds out and incorporates all of the previous skills in the book that we've discussed. And that skill is evaluating arguments. Or in other words, distinguishing a strong argument from a weak one. And the definitions here are wonderfully precise. A strong argument is both directly relevant to the question at hand and genuinely important. Whereas a weak argument is tangential, trivial, or merely imitative, even if it happens to be true.
And to illustrate this, let's now consider this scenario. The question on the table in the leadership meeting is this: Should your company mandate a full return to office?
Well, here's argument one: Yes, because our single largest competitor just mandated it. Strong or weak? Well, hopefully you can see it's weak. After all, what a competitor chooses to do is not directly important to whether it's the right decision for your company, your people, and your specific economics.
But now, let's look at argument two: No, because our last two senior engineering hires explicitly accepted lower salaries in exchange for remote work, and losing them now would cost far more to replace than the [music] office could ever return in value. Strong or weak? Well, this one is strong. And that's because it is directly relevant to the actual decision, and it bears on things that genuinely matter. For instance, cost, talent, retention, and value.
And so now let's look at argument three: Yes, because a full office makes a more impressive backdrop when clients visit. How about this one? Strong or weak? Well, this one is again weak, but this time it's not because it's false. Instead, it's because of its minor importance next to the core stakes of the decision.
And so the core skill here is to take every argument that gets thrown onto the table and run it through two questions and only two. One: Is this actually relevant to the precise question being asked? And two: Is it genuinely important? And you see, the overwhelming majority of arguments people bring to a debate fail at least one of these two tests. And learning to see that instantly in real time dramatically changes how you operate in every conversation.
And so here's what I want you to walk away with. Every one of these skills is a discrete, trainable skill, not some vague, fixed talent that you were either born with or you weren't. And because Watson Glaser has spent nearly a century measuring these exact five skills against an enormous, carefully normed population, it offers you something that almost nothing else in the entire world of self-improvement can: a genuine, scientifically validated measurement of whether your thinking is actually getting sharper instead of just feeling like it is.
If you want to keep leveling up your critical thinking to make a massive impact not only on your own life, but also [music] on the lives of countless others, then be sure to watch this next video.