HKU Moodle

Course Description

In today's fast-paced world, where cognitive biases often cloud judgment and misinformation proliferates on social media, it is crucial to develop robust scientific thinking skills. This course aims to introduce you to the power of scientific thinking and its wide-ranging applications in various personal, professional, and societal contexts.

In this dynamic and interactive course, you will delve into the principles and methods of scientific thinking, including critical thinking, skepticism, and evidence-based reasoning. You will learn how to recognize and overcome cognitive biases, as well as apply scientific thinking to comprehend diverse social, political, and professional issues. By examining real-world cases, research topics, and news articles, you will gain firsthand experience of how scientific methodologies can offer reliable, evidence-based insights that inform decision-making.

Throughout the course, anticipate a high level of participation and engagement as we explore lively discussions and debates on pressing issues and their implications for society and our lives. Upon completion of this course, you will have acquired a deeper understanding of the influence of scientific thinking on personal and professional decision-making. Moreover, you will be armed with the necessary skills to critically assess information and claims related to social, political, and professional matters.

Humans, people, Homo sapiens… who, or what, are we? Although we can marvel at the amazing accomplishments of our species (technology, art, biological adaptations), how much is actually known about our own evolution and development that has enabled us to get to this point?

This course will take you on a six-million-year-long journey and challenge you to rethink what makes us human. How is it that we diverged from our ape and monkey cousins and went down an evolutionary pathway distinctly our own, yet still connected to other species? How did we go from living as hunter-gatherers to now being members of a globally interlinked population of over 7 billion? Why is it that we still have so much conflict, injustice, and inequity? Does that define us, or does compassion, cooperation, and community-building?

Borrowing from history, linguistics, forensic science, cultural studies, genetics, and the biological sciences to better understand the human condition, we will also come to better understand ourselves as contemporary historians, scientific thinkers and social groups. This journey from the distant past to the present, with a glance toward the future, requires no previous knowledge of the topics, but only the curiosity to look into a mirror and see what we can find out about what it means to be "human”.

Why do we feel compelled to constantly check social media? Does individual overuse of social media have an accumulative effect on our society? Can we make any productive changes to ourselves and social media platforms to mitigate our addiction to social media? This course will integrate interdisciplinary knowledge to uncover the driving forces behind social media addiction. The reasons causing people to get addicted to social media are not limited to personal characteristics and include the design and artificial intelligence used by the platforms themselves. In this course, we will introduce both the underlying technical mechanisms and psychological factors that cause behavioral addiction to social media. In addition, the accumulative effect of social media addiction on our personal and professional lives, as well as societies across the world, will be discussed. Through a variety of interactive and reflective learning activities, this course will drive a collective effort among students to develop solutions for minimizing social media addiction and maximizing the beneficial use of social media in both social and academic settings.