Humanities: Expert Guides and Resources

Try this: A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? If “10 cents” jumped out at you, you are in good company, and you are wrong. The ball costs 5 cents. That quick, confident, wrong answer is your fast brain at work, and learning to catch it is one of the first skills of critical thinking.

Have you ever felt you needed to hone your critical thinking skills, to enable you to master the logic of arguments and improve your critical skills as you read, write, speak, or listen? This Cheat Sheet is here to help. © LinkedIn Sales Solutions / Unsplash.comThe ingredients of a good critical thinkerA good critical thinker is composed of many ingredients.

If you don’t understand your society, you can’t truly understand yourself. That's one reason it's worthwhile to study sociology.You are part of your society, and your actions and beliefs are part of what defines that society. Your actions, in a thousand small ways, help shape your society, and your beliefs both influence and are influenced by your society’s norms and values.

The acronym BIPOC has come into common use recently; it stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. The term became widely adopted amid the discussions sparked by the death of George Floyd in 2020, as people confronted the reality that different groups have different experiences. © Dmitry Demidovich / Shutterstock.

What is anthropology? The study of humanity, or anthropology, starts with the origin and evolution of humanity. Other elements key to the study of anthropology are human modernity (anatomical and behavioral); defining culture and cultural universals; how humans feed themselves (subsistence) and the influence of subsistence on social organization; and human language.

Sociology is the study of society — of people interacting in groups, from small social circles to global society. Sociologists gather information about the social world and systematically analyze that information to understand social phenomena including class, race, gender, culture, social networks, and historical change.

Anthropologists don't just study the evolution of human beings; they also learn about their cultures, how cultures develop, and how cultures shape human behavior. If you need to refresh your memory about culture, like what it is and how it guides human behavior, take a look at these aspects: Culture is a learned set of ideas and rules about appropriate behavior shared by a group; it's passed on from one generation to the next not by the genes but with language.

Modern humans have physical and behavioral differences from ancient humans. When you're studying anthropology — specifically, modernity in humans — keep these points in mind. They highlight the most important characteristics of anatomical and behavioral human modernity: Anatomical modernity is having anatomical characteristics indistinguishable from modern, living humans.