FROM CRITICAL THINKING TO CRITICAL TRUST: THE CASE FOR ONLINE LEARNING

Background. On one hand, education is a specific form of social interaction where participants’ trust is a prerequisite rather than an outcome. On the other hand, the contemporary informational environment, in which new educational practices emerge, is replete with unverified and false information that complicates trust. This creates a paradox: online education simultaneously demands both swift trust and epistemic vigilance. Swift trust and epistemic vigilance are understood as two regimes of critical thinking, and the factors influencing the switch between these regimes are the subject of this study. Purpose. To identify the factors that trigger different regimes of critical thinking in online learning. Materials and methods. The theoretical part of the study is based on the synthesis of epistemic trust concept, theory of swift trust and social-epistemological approach to critical thinking. Based on this, the article presents a pilot survey of students of massive open online courses of Lobachevsky University online learning platform (N=83). Results. The main finding is that the key factor in switching between swift trust and epistemic vigilance is the previous negative online learning experiences. having such experience is consolidated and sharply reduces expectations from any subsequent online learning. The absence of negative experiences, on the contrary, increases swift trust and reduces epistemic vigilance. The main mechanisms of switching between regimes of critical thinking in online education are presented as epistemic delegation, appeal to statistics, logical-grammatical representation, and visual representation. Sponsorship information. The work was funded with a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (project № 24-28-00809 “Critical thinking studies: fundamental research on critical thinking as an interdisciplinary problem”)