Writing in "The Guardian" on the 50th anniversary of the album's release, Bob Stanley described "Think for Yourself" as "cool but fierce". He grouped it with "Norwegian Wood" and "Girl" as songs that conveyed the Beatles' new, sophisticated outlook at the time and, decades later, evoked progressive women such as Edie Sedgwick, Maureen Cleave and Pauline Boty. He said that the same three songs were statements that ensured that "Rubber Soul" would remain "fresh" for another 50 years. Also writing in December 2015, Emily Mackay of the "NME" described the song as "acerbic" and empathetic with the confused sexual politics of "Norwegian Wood". She recognised Harrison's "assertion of independent-mindedness" as a forerunner to Lennon's 1968 song "Revolution". In his 2015 book "1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music", Andrew Grant Jackson identifies it as the Beatles' contribution to a "subgenre" of protest songs that emerged in 1965, in which artists railed against "oppressive conformity itself" rather than political issues. He views it as one of the musical statements that, informed by mass media, hallucinogenic drugs and the introduction of the contraceptive pill, "chronicled and propelled a social reformation as the old world forged its uneasy synthesis with the new".