TL;DR. AI tools now produce answers in seconds. That makes the ability to tell a good answer from a bad one, to ask the right question and to see where an argument breaks down more valuable, and those are exactly the skills philosophy has been training for 2,500 years. The evidence partly supports this claim. A 2025 study of 649,511 US students found that philosophy is chosen by students who are already more curious and verbally strong, but that even after accounting for those pre-existing differences, philosophy students outperformed every other major on verbal and logical reasoning tests (Prinzing and Vazquez, 2025). A meta-analysis combining 341 effect sizes on teaching critical thinking found an average of g = 0.30 and highlighted the positive effect of opportunities for dialogue (Abrami and colleagues, 2015). On the other hand, in England the “Philosophy for Children” program showed about two months of additional progress in reading and maths in a first trial with 48 schools, but a larger 198-school replication found no effect on reading. Ethics professors also behave no more morally than other academics (Schwitzgebel and Rust, 2014). The CEO move is to use philosophy not as a body of knowledge but as a discipline of judgment. The student move is to question one idea every week by writing down its assumptions.
Why was this article rewritten?
The 2022 English version, a translation of a 2020 Turkish article, listed five benefits of philosophy: thinking, critical thinking, questioning, values and meaning. Those five headings still hold. But the article contained no data, included a quote whose source could not be verified and had no AI-era layer. This version keeps the five headings, places primary sources that were opened and read under each one, and states plainly where the evidence is weak. The unverifiable quote has been removed.
Does philosophy really make you think better?
The answer to this question starts with “yes, but”.
The selection effect is real. Who chooses philosophy matters. Prinzing and Vazquez’s 2025 study, published in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, examined 649,511 students at 804 colleges and universities (4,843 of them philosophy students). According to the results, “students with stronger verbal abilities, who are more curious, open-minded and intellectually rigorous” are more inclined to study philosophy.
But the gap is not limited to selection. The same study found that, even after accounting for these pre-existing differences, philosophy students outperformed every other major on verbal and logical reasoning tests and on a measure of “valuable habits of mind”. There is an important limitation: the test scores are self-reported, and the authors note that some of the skills measured by graduate exams may not have been well captured by the entrance exam.
Graduate exam scores point the same way. According to the official interpretive guide for the GRE, the US graduate admissions test (July 2022-June 2025), the 785 test takers intending to study “Philosophy and Religious Studies” averaged 159 on the verbal section, 156 on the quantitative section and 4.2 on analytical writing.
| GRE measure | Philosophy and Religious Studies | All test takers | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Verbal reasoning | 159 | 151.39 | +7.61 |
| Quantitative reasoning | 156 | 157.62 | -1.62 |
| Analytical writing | 4.2 | 3.46 | +0.74 |
Source: ETS, GRE Guide to the Use of Scores, Tables 1A and 3A. The difference column is a calculation made within the CEOtudent editorial framework. Because the philosophy row covers seniors and graduates while the “all test takers” row covers everyone who sat the exam, the comparison is approximate and not causal.
Critical thinking can be taught. Huber and Kuncel’s 2016 meta-analysis found that both critical thinking skills and dispositions improve “substantially” over a normal university experience, but also showed that curriculum-wide critical thinking programs provide no additional gain in the long run. Abrami and colleagues’ 2015 meta-analysis found an average of g = 0.30 across 341 effect sizes on teaching critical thinking and highlighted in particular the positive effect of “opportunities for dialogue”, working on authentic problems and mentoring. Dialogue is the core method of philosophical inquiry.
Philosophy for children: a promising trial, a replication that found zero
The most frequently cited evidence for the benefits of philosophy is the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) trials in England. The story shows well why evidence has to be read carefully.
| Study | Scale | Main finding | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| EEF 2015 (Gorard, Siddiqui and See) | 48 schools, 3,159 pupils | About 2 months of additional progress in reading and maths (maths +0.10; reading +0.12) | The entire cognitive ability gain came from the verbal subscale |
| Topping and Trickey 2007 | 8 schools, 177 pupils | 16 months, 1 hour per week; effect size 0.7 | Small sample; effect taken from the EEF report |
| EEF 2021 (Lord et al.) | 198 schools (75 intervention, 123 control) | No effect on reading for disadvantaged pupils: 0.02 (-0.09 to 0.13) | High security rating; 35 of the 75 schools did not implement the program at the expected level |
Evidence summary: CEOtudent editorial framework, compiled from the EEF reports.
The authors of the 2021 report write that, had the 2015 data been analyzed with their own methods, it was “unlikely to have shown such a positive effect”. In the same report, 96 percent of teachers felt pupils’ respect for others’ views had increased and 93 percent felt pupils expressed their views more clearly; however, no effect was found on social and communication skills as measured by the pupil survey. The report also makes one thing clear: giving lesson time to this activity did not lower reading and maths results.
The honest conclusion: philosophical discussion is harmless and valued by teachers, but there is no strong evidence that it raises school attainment.
5 valuable things philosophy will add to your life
1. Thinking: owning the question while AI supplies the answer
AI tools are taking over some steps of the thinking process. In a survey of 319 knowledge workers by Lee and colleagues (CHI 2025), participants reported applying some form of critical thinking in about 60 percent (555) of the 936 examples they shared. More importantly, as confidence in AI rose, critical thinking fell, and as people’s confidence in themselves rose, it increased. The study shows that AI shifts critical thinking toward “information verification, response integration and task stewardship”. Thinking does not disappear; it moves. For a more detailed look at this topic, see our article is AI making you worse at thinking.
2. Critical thinking: judgment, the least delegated skill
In the same study, the share of steps where participants said they spent less effort with AI was 72 percent for knowledge, 79 percent for comprehension, 69 percent for application, 72 percent for analysis, 76 percent for synthesis and 55 percent for evaluation. In other words, the least delegated step is deciding whether something is good. Gerlich’s (2025) study of 666 participants found a significant negative relationship between frequent AI use and critical thinking skills, mediated by cognitive offloading; people with higher levels of education had better critical thinking skills regardless of AI use. Both studies are cross-sectional and rely on self-reports. We covered why judgment has become the most valuable skill in the judgment economy.
Employers point the same way. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, analytical thinking is the top skill, considered core by 69 percent of companies in 2025; creative thinking is on the list at 57 percent and curiosity and lifelong learning at 50 percent. The report expects creative thinking and curiosity and lifelong learning to keep growing in importance over 2025-2030.
3. Questioning: the Socratic method works
Philosophy’s oldest tool is asking a good question. Socratic questioning is today also one of the core techniques of cognitive therapy. In a study by Braun and colleagues (2015) on the treatment of depression, a therapist using Socratic questioning one standard deviation more in a session predicted a 1.51-point drop on the depression scale (BDI-II) in the next session. The effect held after controlling for the therapeutic alliance. The sample is small, but the finding shows that asking questions is not merely an intellectual exercise. To improve question quality in the AI era, see better questions beat better answers.
4. Values: knowing ethics is not enough on its own
The ethics side of philosophy needs an honest caveat. Schwitzgebel and Rust compared 198 ethics professors, 208 other philosophers and 167 non-philosophy professors: “on no issue did ethicists behave significantly better than both comparison groups”. In another study, ethics professors voted at about the same rate as other academics, and relatively obscure contemporary ethics books were about 50 percent more likely to go missing from leading academic libraries than other philosophy books of similar age and popularity. On the other hand, ethics instruction can change some behavior: after a class on meat ethics, the share of meat-containing purchases in students’ on-campus transactions fell from 30 percent to 23 percent (Schwitzgebel, Cokelet and Singer, 2021).
The lesson: knowing about ethics does not guarantee acting ethically. Living your values requires tying them to concrete decisions.
5. Meaning and perspective: not events, but interpretations
The line the Stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote in the Enchiridion has been quoted for two thousand years: “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.” This idea points the same way as modern cognitive approaches, which hold that our interpretations shape our emotions more than events themselves. To question your own habits of decision and interpretation, the second-order thinking workout is a good place to start.
What does studying philosophy add to a career?
In the US, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s table by major, published on February 4, 2026 and based on 2024 data, paints a mixed picture for philosophy graduates.
| Indicator (US, 2024) | Philosophy | All majors | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recent graduate unemployment (ages 22-27) | 5.1% | 4.2% | +0.9 points |
| Underemployment | 47.1% | 39.4% | +7.8 points |
| Early-career median wage | $52,000 | $58,000 | -10.3% |
| Mid-career median wage (ages 35-45) | $80,000 | $87,000 | -8.0% |
| Share with a graduate degree | 56.9% | 39.3% | +17.5 points |
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of New York, The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates, data file by major. The difference column is a calculation made within the CEOtudent editorial framework.
Philosophy graduates trail the average slightly on wages and underemployment, but more than half go on to graduate study. The table suggests that philosophy works best not as a profession on its own but as a thinking foundation layered on top of another specialism.
A weekly 20-minute protocol for philosophical thinking
The protocol below is a CEOtudent editorial framework; it is not a tested program but a practical habit built on the evidence above (dialogue, questioning, judgment).
| Step | Time | What you do | Which skill |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Pick a claim | 3 min | Write down a claim you read this week or got from an AI tool | Thinking |
| 2. Extract the assumptions | 5 min | Write three things that must be true for the claim to be true | Critical thinking |
| 3. Socratic question | 5 min | Answer “How do we know this?” and “What would a counterexample be?” | Questioning |
| 4. Values test | 4 min | Write who would win and who would lose if you acted on this claim | Values |
| 5. Interpretation test | 3 min | In one sentence, write the view of someone who interprets the same event completely differently | Perspective |
Weekly protocol: CEOtudent editorial framework.
Writing is part of this protocol; we covered why it works in writing as thinking.
Frequently asked questions
Does studying philosophy make you smarter?
“Smart” is a broad concept. The strongest evidence shows that philosophy students outperform other majors in verbal and logical reasoning even after accounting for pre-existing differences. But this is an observational study; there is no random assignment.
Does teaching philosophy to children improve school attainment?
The first 48-school trial in England found about two months of additional progress, but the larger 198-school replication found no effect on reading. The program is harmless and valued by teachers, but its effect on academic attainment is not proven.
Does ethics education make people more moral?
Generally, no: ethics professors behave no better than other academics. However, ethics instruction on a concrete topic, as in the meat consumption example, can change some behavior in the short term.
Why does philosophy matter in the AI era?
AI makes producing answers cheap; it does not make evaluating them cheap. Knowledge workers say evaluation is the step where they save the least effort with AI, and employers see analytical thinking as the most important skill. Philosophy is the oldest training ground for this skill of judgment.
Do you need to switch majors to study philosophy?
No. The weekly protocol above and dialogue-based discussion groups are ways to build philosophical thinking habits in any profession.
Sources
- Prinzing M, Vazquez M. Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers. Journal of the American Philosophical Association. 2025;11(4):640-658.
- Educational Testing Service. GRE Guide to the Use of Scores (July 2022-June 2025 data); A Snapshot of the Individuals Who Took the GRE General Test, 2025.
- Huber CR, Kuncel NR. Does College Teach Critical Thinking? A Meta-Analysis. Review of Educational Research. 2016;86(2):431-468. Abstract.
- Abrami PC, Bernard RM, Borokhovski E, Waddington DI, Wade CA, Persson T. Strategies for Teaching Students to Think Critically: A Meta-Analysis. Review of Educational Research. 2015;85(2):275-314. Abstract.
- Gorard S, Siddiqui N, See BH. Philosophy for Children: Evaluation report and executive summary. Education Endowment Foundation, July 2015.
- Lord P, Dirie A, Kettlewell K, Styles B. Evaluation of Philosophy for Children: an effectiveness trial. Education Endowment Foundation and NFER, March 2021.
- Topping KJ, Trickey S. Collaborative philosophical enquiry for school children: cognitive effects at 10-12 years. British Journal of Educational Psychology. 2007;77(2):271-288. Abstract; effect size taken from the EEF 2015 report.
- Lee HP, Sarkar A, Tankelevitch L, Drosos I, Rintel S, Banks R, Wilson N. The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking. CHI 2025.
- Gerlich M. AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking. Societies. 2025;15(1):6. Abstract.
- World Economic Forum. The Future of Jobs Report 2025. January 2025.
- Braun JD, Strunk DR, Sasso KE, Cooper AA. Therapist use of Socratic questioning predicts session-to-session symptom change in cognitive therapy for depression. Behaviour Research and Therapy. 2015;70:32-37. Abstract.
- Schwitzgebel E, Rust J. The Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors. Philosophical Psychology. 2014;27:293-327; Do Ethicists and Political Philosophers Vote More Often Than Other Professors? Review of Philosophy and Psychology. 2010;1(2):189-199. Abstract.
- Schwitzgebel E. Do Ethicists Steal More Books? Philosophical Psychology. 2009;22:711-725. Abstract.
- Schwitzgebel E, Cokelet B, Singer P. Students Eat Less Meat After Studying Meat Ethics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology. 2021. Abstract.
- Epictetus. Enchiridion, chapter V. Translated by Thomas W. Higginson.
- Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates: Outcomes by Major. February 4, 2026 (2024 data).
The difference columns in the GRE and New York Fed tables, the EEF evidence summary and the weekly protocol are CEOtudent analyses based on the sources above. All other figures are reported as published in the sources; sources of which only the abstract was read are marked. The unverifiable quote from the earlier version has been removed.
This content was compiled with the support of AI following in-depth research, then written and prepared for publication by the CEOtudent editorial team.
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