Critical thinking gets confused with two very different things: reflexively doubting everything, and reflexively believing whatever sounds confident. Neither is actually critical thinking — both skip the step of evaluating evidence.
Ask what would change your mind
A useful test for any belief is whether you can name a specific piece of evidence that would change it. If nothing could, the belief isn't being held for evidential reasons, and no amount of argument will move it either way.
Separate the claim from the source's confidence
Confident delivery is not evidence. A claim stated with certainty and one stated with hedging can carry the exact same underlying evidence — confidence is a communication style, not a truth signal, and it's worth evaluating them separately.
Check the base rate
A dramatic individual story is memorable but tells you little about how common something actually is. Asking "how often does this actually happen, generally" before reacting to a single vivid example helps avoid overreacting to rare events that simply got more attention.
Distinguish correlation from cause
Two things happening together doesn't establish that one causes the other — a third factor might explain both, or the direction of causation might run the opposite way from what's assumed. This single distinction resolves a large share of misleading claims in health and social science reporting.
Stay curious, not combative
Treating a questionable claim as a puzzle to investigate, rather than an opponent to defeat, keeps the process useful and keeps you open to actually changing your mind when the evidence warrants it — which is the entire point of thinking critically in the first place.
The honest takeaway
Good critical thinking checks evidence, not confidence; asks what would change its mind; and stays curious rather than cynical. It's a slower process than either blind trust or blind doubt, but it's the only one that reliably tracks what's actually true.