I had a great chat about how studying philosophy can make people better thinkers with @mvazquez.bsky.social, @markalfano.bsky.social, Deborah Mower, and Heather Battaly. Thanks to @apaphilosophy.bsky.social for hosting and making the recording available!
www.apaonline.org/mpage/benefi...

Turns out studying philosophy is actually valuable. Philosophy majors don’t just argue well, they actually become better thinkers and do better on tests.

Data from 600k students shows they outscore every other major on reasoning, curiosity and open-mindedness.

I don't know of any, but that's a great question! There's tons of data on college students because institutions collect them. Maybe there's a philosophy for fun organization that could be persuaded to collect data? That would be awesome!

Experiments find effects on PEB on well-being too! They may reflect low impact behaviors, though. That's a nice contribution, consistent with other work on well-being (major life events matter less than daily lifestyle)
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I think you're right! Check it out! In "Leiterific" journals there's been really dramatic growth in citations of empirical sources and references to empirical data, evidence, research, etc. Also, articles citing more empirical sources receive more citations (i.e., are more influential).

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The Benefits of Studying Philosophy

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Thanks for the suggestions! I'll take a look at the Nisbett chapter. @mvazquez.bsky.social and I reviewed a bunch of older work (going back to the 70s) in another paper, but we may have missed some of this stuff.

Same here! In fact, in a prior paper we concluded that there was basically no evidence for anything but self-selection. But these results totally changed my mind!

Of course it's not as strong as a randomized experiment, but we think this is really striking evidence that philosophy does make people better thinkers!

The open-access paper is now available in the @apa-journal.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1017/apa....
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We found that philosophy students outperformed all others on verbal and logical reasoning as well as habits of mind, when controlling for baseline differences (i.e., when students were freshman).
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@mvazquez.bsky.social and I analyzed data from over half a million college students, looking at tests of verbal, logical, and mathematical reasoning, plus self-report measures of valuable habits of mind (a mix of curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual rigor, etc.)
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A popular and very old argument for the value of philosophy claims that studying philosophy cultivates important intellectual abilities and dispositions. But empirical evidence for that claim has been hard to come by. Until now!
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