Studying Philosophy Makes People Better Thinkers: Further Data
A new study “offers the strongest evidence to date that studying philosophy does indeed make people better thinkers.”
Readers may recall the previous research of Michael Prinzing (Baylor) & Michael Vazquez (UNC), discussed here last year, about how “philosophy majors tend to [show] more growth than non-philosophy majors” on some traits indexed by the Habits of Mind scale, a measure of intellectual dispositions.
In a new article published in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, they elaborate on that but also share new data regarding how well philosophy majors do on standardized tests often required for admission to graduate programs, like the GRE and the LSAT, compared to other majors.
Unlike other lists you may have seen comparing how majors do on such tests, the ones created by Prinzing and Vazquez are an attempt to account for the fact that many students who choose to major in philosophy already have the skills needed to do well on such tests, and to instead show the difference that majoring in philosophy can make to their scores on them. So they control for SAT scores, so as “to remove the influence of pre-college confounds, thereby giving a more accurate estimate of the treatment effects.”
Here’s what they say:
Starting with the standardized tests, we ran three separate models for scores on the GRE Verbal, GRE Quantitative, and LSAT. Unsurprisingly, SAT scores were significantly, positively associated with GRE and LSAT scores across the board. But crucially, after accounting for SAT scores, philosophy majors scored significantly higher than non-philosophy majors on the GRE Verbal and LSAT. On the GRE Quantitative, by contrast, there was no significant difference between philosophy and non-philosophy majors.
Baseline-adjusted average scores for philosophy and non-philosophy majors. Points and error bars indicate estimated marginal means with 95% confidence intervals, derived from mixed-effects regression models. Means are adjusted for SAT scores. From Prinzing & Vazquez “Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers” (2025).
And here are their SAT-adjusted lists of how different majors do on these exams:
Baseline-adjusted average scores on self-report measures for specific majors. Points and error bars indicate estimated marginal means with 95% confidence intervals derived from mixed-effects regression models. Philosophy is highlighted with red. From Prinzing & Vazquez “Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers” (2025).
You can read more about their study here.
Am I reading these graphs wrong, or is it true that majors in Cultural/Ethnic Studies do quite well on the quantitative GRE, and that majors in Music and Art Education do well on the LSAT? Some of these scores look surprising to me.
Looks like it! (Though the variance must be *quite* high in the dataset, given the very wide error bar around the estimate.)
I think there was some work a while ago (unrelated to this) that showed links between linguistic / verbal skills and computer programming skills. The press discussing the paper framed it as a surprising finding, given that, in popular culture, we tend to associate programming more strongly with quantitative skills than verbal ones. Others (including the authors, if I’m recalling any of this correctly?) pointed out that it probably wasn’t that surprising.
I think these sorts of studies are interesting because we seem to find them surprising in ways that maybe we shouldn’t. I don’t know, maybe we’ve become so inured to cultural habits that sort people into neat baskets that we’re continually surprising ourselves when we find that such habits have led us astray (and maybe even constrained the creative and learning possibilities we have allowed ourselves and others to explore?)
The best example I can think of here is the mythical “left-brain” / “right-brain” divide—a grotesque oversimplification that, up until recently it seems, dominated our folk explanations for why some people are inclined to pursue the arts and others are into math, finance, or some other field of study or creative endeavour.
At any rate, this type of work is interesting and important, but old habits die hard.
another possible explanation that has nothing to do with the topics themselves: students who major in Music and Art Education may well tend to be white, upper-class [and the correlation with this and standardized tests], and already had had designs on going to law school. So, it’s not clear what that means.
I think these numbers are meant to be adjusted based on SAT scores – anything that benefits people for standardized tests generally should cancel out if they did this right, so it would have to be features that help people more for the GRE than for the SAT (or features that hurt people more for the SAT than for the GRE).
My guess here (and it’s just a guess) is that those majors have very few students, and there is a big range of performance among the small number of students (hence the wide error bars) and the a couple of outliers are having outsized impact on the score.
As others have already noted, those seem to be some of the widest error bars, so those are likely very small sample size. A few other large error bars are Kinesiology, Special Education, Pharmacy, Other Education, Architecture/Urban Planing and (to a lesser extent) Computer Engineering.
If you just sort of blur your vision and stare at the graphs a bit you can see the distribution of the large error bars. It might be useful to think of all the large error bars as different estimates of one heterogeneous field. Most of the very lowest numbers are from large error bars – these are most likely erroneously-low estimates, just as some of the high ones are likely erroneously-high estimates.
Thanks, I did wonder about those large error bars and what they might mean.
Beyond what others have said: it’s not that they do well, it’s that they do well *relative to their SAT scores*. That’s a big difference. They may still perform rather badly on these tests relative to other majors if they had lower SATs to begin with.
We can think of all sorts of selection effects that might be going on. For example, if majors differ in how much effort students put into the SAT, but not in how much effort they put in the GRE, majors with initially less-motivated students would score higher on this metric.
These sort of selection effects are the reason why this approach of controlling for baseline differences isn’t really taken seriously anymore in disciplines concerned with causal inference (esp. economics).
I might be speaking a little tongue-in-cheek, but philosophers’ readiness to embrace bad studies when they purport to show evidence for the benefits of studying philosophy seems like a good reason not to believe that studying philosophy strengthens so-called critical thinking skills.
I think there is something wrong about your tongue-in-cheek framing at the end. Consider: why think that philosophers show a readiness to embrace bad studies when they purport to show professionally favorable evidence?
This amounts to an empirical claim. So, either one can muster direct evidence for the claim or one can rely on more indirect evidence for the claim. In the first case, except if the evidence is unfavorable, won’t the same skepticism apply? So this mode of engagement with individual empirical studies relevant to the profession seems to be a pessimistic regress: doubt everything but the worst. One might turn to meta-analysis, but then other methodological concerns can again fuel analogous skepticism in favor of pessimism. If the response is that skepticism (of all kinds) simply gets harder to sustain in practice, with more studies and meta-analysis coming in, then that’s all well and good for our epistemology. But I don’t think anyone in the imagined conversation, who we have granted values that empirical evidence is ever being gathered, would object to such a view: all who get excited by new data, I would imagine, privately dream of ever more additional labor being performed to provide ever more data on the given subject. And in the meantime, an optimism is being expressed by discussing results already gotten. Science is always in process/ongoing; we talk on the basis of what has already been done.
In the second case, where evidence is (always, in some sense) indirect, then we need a way of adjudicating how new studies of all kinds are responsibly assimilated into our complex web of beliefs. At least one plausible model for thinking through how to do this is Bayesian conditionalizing. Here, optimism again need not be any sign of deficiencies in critical thinking. It might reflect that relative to priors that have been informed by all sorts of (more distal) empirical considerations brought to bear on the present hypothesis, this new result is positive confirmation but hardly surprising.
In all, I just don’t think there’s enough signs within these discussions (or discussions like these) that express optimism, that philosophers are thereby exhibiting weak critical thinking because, after all, there’s only the one study at hand.
*edit: I’m not commenting one way or the other about the merits of this particular study design/analysis. I’m just thinking in general about what counts as appropriate versus inappropriate engagement with new studies (even weak ones) in areas that one is excited to have more data at all about.
Thank you very much to the authors for doing this analysis! I’m convinced. Of course, I was already, but I’ve been showing the test results for years as part of our ‘promoting philosophy’ sessions, making jokes about how studying philosophy will help students see that these data may not indicate any causal relation between majoring in philosophy and higher test scores. I would love to see someone work up a short presentation of these results as a way to promote the practical value of philosophy, while simultaneously teaching how to think philosophically about correlation and causation and how to try to test for the difference.
Need to set up a randomised controlled trial. Call it the Trial of Socrates.
Better yet, SOPHIA: Study of Philosophers Heightened Intellectual Aptitude.
Sure, it’s a bit self-aggrandising, and may beg the question in favour of certain conclusions, but come on…
These seemingly perennial efforts to demonstrate the extrinsic utility of philosophy for career advancement strike me as ill-advised. Attempting to “sell” philosophy to students, colleagues, and administrators based on these sorts of data distracts us from the inherent value of philosophical inquiry and its place in an education understood as Bildung rather than “credentialing.” Students having a graduate or law school admittance goal should study philosophy because they find it intrinsically interesting and because it will deepen their understanding of the philosophical aspects of their primary discipline in a way that makes them more intellectually serious, rather than because it promises to deliver higher test scores. Focusing on test score data-driven arguments to defend philosophy involves a wholesale surrender to those who see education as credentialing and who are expert at massaging data to their own ends.
There’s definitely a worry about massaging data.
But I think there really are legitimately different preferences people have of what they want to get out of education. I don’t think that everyone who wants training for professional or managerial work more than they want Bildung is therefore wrong – they just want different things, as some people want to watch opera while others want to watch football.
There probably are a good number of people who would appreciate Bildung if they got it, and just don’t know that they want it. But it seems just as wrong to try to insist that *everyone* is like that as to assume that everyone cares more about the GRE scores than any intrinsic interest in their studies.
Different arguments should target different populations.
I would share any concern about reducing philosophy to a mere credentialing tool in general, but I don’t see a reductive worry here. Intellectual virtues developed through studying philosophy are not only instrumentally valuable for professional success and democratic life, but are also part of what it means to live well. The linked paper also clearly distinguishes test scores from loftier habits of mind that are measured in other ways. Of course, one *could* take these results and use them for reductive, narrowly credentialist ends, but I don’t see that.
On the one hand, it’s nice to have something to point to when asked, “What’s the point in studying that?” or “Where will that lead?” On the other, I feel that maybe it’s the wrong kind of question to be asking in the first place, and that a better response would be to interrogate where that question comes from or why answers to it matter. However, I acknowledge that, partly because I can be lazy, I’d go with the first option in many cases, if only because the second approach—while arguably more in the spirit of what higher education is supposed to be—is off-putting to many. There are reasons it’s off-putting, and those are worth exploring, but we need to be of cognizant of time and place; considering when it would be good or productive to have that conversation. That said, I’m not sure I can always discern when the right time and place for that conversation is. Or maybe I’m wrong to even worry about it being off-putting; that is, maybe that’s something to lean into rather than to worry about. I don’t know.
Where I teach (Georgia State) has a large proportion of Pell grant recipients and first generation college students. When students in our gen ed, intro-level courses find out they really like philosophy, they still worry about what they’ll do with a philosophy major. I’m not going to say to them “You should be thinking only about the intrinsic value of your major, not these careerist, credentialist concerns.” Ignoring the practicality of their major is a luxury they can’t afford.
More broadly, many students find philosophy weird and esoteric, or they dislike writing argumentative essays. I’m not worried about lots of students deciding to study philosophy merely for extrinsic reasons. The people who approach education with a 100% extrinsic/credentialist/careerist attitude will find something else to major in. The real problem we have is with the students who like philosophy intrinsically but who are reluctant to pursue it because of practical concerns. We can assuage those concerns, and as others have pointed out, doing so is compatible with also stressing the intrinsic reasons to study philosophy. The one doesn’t crowd out the other.
I found this research interesting, but I don’t have the statistical chops necessary to evaluate it as accurate. I asked a colleague in social science, who teaches statistics (and in college double majored in philosophy and psychology) what she thought and her reply is below. Can anyone respond to her? Thanks. Here’s her reply: “I can’t tell the direction or causality from the abstract, nor any statistical controls. They were philosophy majors first, then they took a verbal skills test and did better compared to…who or what? This doesn’t mean learning philosophy caused them to have better verbal skills–and shouldn’t it be analytic skills? Maybe learning philosophy just causes you to be a better test taker. So there was a lot if data; big hairy deal. Unless there’s a structural equation model in there or some kind of path analysis, it’s all just correlations.”
Hi Jack! The paper is open access, so you could give your friend the link if she’s interested in the details. But, briefly, the key strength of these data is that we can go beyond mere group comparisons. With data from students both at the start of freshman year and the end of senior year, we can adjust for baseline differences when comparing philosophy majors with others at the end of college. So, for example, we find that students with better verbal reasoning abilities (as measured by the SAT Verbal) are significantly more likely to major in philosophy. But, even after controlling for these initial differences, philosophy majors still score higher than any other major on the GRE Verbal.
It’s been a while since I’ve done any statistical/quantitative work, but given that the reporting on the paper is framed around the claim that “philosophy majors tend to [show] more growth than non-philosophy majors” (emphasis added), it seems like some kind of longitudinal growth model would be warranted as a source of evidence for that claim. I’m not sure if the paper itself claims this (i.e., the claim of growth) though; maybe the authors reach a more modest conclusion. But it’d be genuinely interesting to track change over time, and for that I think the sort of modelling your colleague talks about would be needed.
I worked my way through the statistics and have a few responses to those wondering how reliable the authors findings and interpretations are. The first concern is that the data are all self-reported. They ask students to rate themselves on “habits of mind” and “pluralistic orientation” and also self-report their standardized test scores. I’m most worried about self-reports on questions like how often a student supports opinions with logical arguments or is open to having their views challenged, since self-reports tend to reflect desired self-presentation as well as actual behavior. Philosophy students know they are expected to use logical arguments and accept being challenged, so it could just be a self-presentation effect that gets stronger after they have undertaken philosophical studies. I’m less worried that philosophy students are more likely to report lower SAT or higher GRE/SAT scores, so I’ll just talk about the findings on those.
Overall, the associations for test scores seem pretty convincing, as long as you don’t try to do more than the data can handle. A weird thing in the paper is that they are focusing on changes in pre- and post study test scores, but instead of reporting GRE – SAT, they report GRE “adjusted for” the SAT. But still, if you compare philosophy to all other fields combined the error bar for the latter is really tight, so the 30-odd point greater improvement for philosophy in verbal GRE is quite clear (as is the improvement for LSATs but differing scales leave me wondering how to interpret the number), and there’s just nothing there for quant GRE. Because this is a pretest-posttest design, it already controls for most individual differences across students. The primary concern would be an interaction between field and student that doesn’t reflect learning (like the self-presentation effect I mentioned above). They also use fixed effects so that their error bars are calculated not by comparing all philosophy students to all others, but all philosophers at school A to others at A, all philosophers at school B to others at B, etc.
I wouldn’t read much into the posted figure showing all of the fields separately–that’s asking more than the data can provide. But for those near the top or bottom you could compare against all others like the authors did for philosophy. You can eyeball this and see that the results would probably be reasonable, with English majors probably better on GRE verbal (but pharmacy majors not better on the LSAT because the error bar is too wide, even though their mean ranks second), and physics, math, and engineering folks better on GRE quant.
The paper closes with some more sophisticated tests that try to account for possibilities related to who is more and less likely to take the GRE or LSAT at all, since not all students do. It looks like the kind of thing added in response to a reviewers’ concern, and suggests the concern is not too serious.
My bottom line is that this seems like reasonable evidence of a causal effect, not just a selection effect, not just because the stats are strong, but because the strongest results comport pretty well with what I would expect from immersing yourself in a field that requires strong verbal skills.
A question related to this discussion: Does anyone know of empirical studies comparing the value of a philosophy major with a philosophy minor? After all, if students get the same positive boost from merely taking a few philosophy classes, rather than a full major, that waters down the “extrinsic value” of philosophy degrees. Yes, I’m looking for the “dose response study” of philosophy! Any leads?
This is an interesting idea! My guess is that data on minors is harder to come by, but maybe not. A related question, carrying this logic forward, is whether we would see effects (even if smaller in size) of one-off philosophy classes, or of gen eds or pedagogical approaches that are infused with philosophy’s “secret sauce.” Put differently, is philosophy a portable intervention that could be used in, for example, gen eds or in other disciplinary contexts.