Interview with Nicole McCallum about Critical Thinking and Better Decision Making

In this episode, I spoke with Nicole McCallum, co-founder at the Waterloo Region Environment Network (WREN), current PhD candidate at Laurier, and professor, previously at the University of Guelph and now at Laurier University. Today, there’s an overwhelming challenge of misinformation, that you can see in just about any industry, including in cosmetics. You see “green” beauty products everywhere these days, but what actually makes a product sustainable? It’s obviously very important, especially in light of all of the environmental issues we see today, to move towards more sustainable practices… Unfortunately, there’s a lot of confusion about what practices will be sustainable, especially on the consumer side, which has been compounded by misleading marketing, media without the scruples to effectively interpret new research, and well-intentioned but ultimately misinformed individuals with a large platform. I truly believe that this misinformation challenge is one of the major challenges of our age, and I think part of the solution falls on everyday individuals. In today’s info overloaded world, we need to be better critical thinkers, which was the topic of this episode. In our conversation, we spoke about information bias, emotional decision making, human nature and our propensity towards certain ideologies, the Dunning Kruger effect, and steps we can all take to be better decision makers.