The use of ChatGPT in the development of critical thinking

• Published in: Психолог no. 2; pp. 111 - 119
• Main Author: Konkov, Kirill Alekseevich
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.02.2025
• ISSN: 2409-8701; 2409-8701
• DOI: 10.25136/2409-8701.2025.2.70717

Technological progress creates new opportunities for the development of users' cognitive skills. At the same time, the number of questions and problems for most researchers in the field of cognitive psychology is increasing. Innovations, including achievements in neural networks, and their impact on psychological aspects of personality annually attract many scientists and become one of the main subjects of studies. The subject of this paper are texts generated by ChatGPT. Given the rapidly increasing pace of technological innovations, it is important to understand how they affect cognitive processes. Thus, this article aims to reveal the relationship between the use of ChatGPT and critical thinking development. The experiment and content-analysis research methods were chosen, in which questions were asked to the artificial intelligence and the received responses were examined to find correlations between messages and their potential impact on the critical thinking development. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the consideration of a new approach to artificial intelligence as a tool that facilitates the development of the ability to think critically. The study revealed that improving the skill of thinking critically is possible through a group discussion or self-studies, however, in both cases there are disadvantages that make it difficult to achieve this goal and slow down the process: lack of motivation, time, sufficient quantity and quality of examples and arguments, information overload, incompetence or stereotypical thinking. In this regard, being built on large corpuses of text and capable of generating a wide variety of responses, ChatGPT is a tool that stimulates the improvement of analytical and thinking abilities. The virtual assistant's capabilities include composing responses in such a way as to encourage users to evaluate the received data, pose clarifying questions, and analyze different points of view, thereby developing the ability to think critically.