Show Me the Evidence

Previous-Section Takeaways

• ► You don’t always realize what you don’t know, so “zooming out” to get a summary of expert opinions is a good first step. Before diving headfirst into a new topic, start off by “reading the room.”
• ► Cynicism doesn’t make you any smarter than gullibility. To avoid “trust compression,” distinguish between little problems and giant failings in the sources you evaluate.
• ► Avoid relying on a single self-proclaimed expert. Instead, try to assess and understand the range of credible expert opinion on a subject.

6 Show Me the Evidence

Scholarly Sources and Promotional Claims

Can playing chess make you smarter? Why not? The game demands concentration, forethought, and cool-headed logic—the same virtues that define critical thinking.

Before you reach for that dusty chessboard, let’s look at the evidence.

When you ask Google about the connection between chess and intelligence, one of the first results to come up is a 104-page document called The Benefits of Chess in Education, compiled by Patrick S. McDonald, the youth coordinator for the Chess Federation of Canada. McDonald’s report claims that the movement of knights and rooks not only “makes kids smart” and “improves academic performance” but also “enhance[s] creativity, problem solving, memory, concentration, intellectual maturity, self-esteem, and many other abilities.”1 A veritable jackpot of benefits.

OK, clearly this author has a lot of skin in this game and may not be the most objective source. But the report backs up its claims with a staggering list of references—titles like “Scientific Proof: Chess Improves Reading Scores,” “Utilizing Chess to Promote Self-Esteem in Perceptually Impaired Students,” and “The Effect of Chess on Reading Scores: District Nine Chess Program Second Year Report.”

When you look a bit closer, however, an unmistakable pattern emerges. Most of the references cite magazine articles (including one that itself needs dusting off—from a 1931 National Geographic), along with newsletters from organizations like the “Commission of Chess in Schools,” scattered doctoral dissertations from the 1990s, and a mishmash of presentations delivered at random conferences. What ties them all together is not something they possess but something they lack. Almost all these references do an end run around the process known as peer review.