Lesson 13

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Lesson 13

• Overcoming Obstacles to Critical Thinking

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Group Think

• Faulty decision-making in a group.
• Groups experiencing groupthink do not consider
  all alternatives and they desire unanimity at the
  expense of quality decisions.
• We are not thinking for ourselves instead we
  allow the group to think for us.

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Group Think

• Comes from our desire to be liked/respected by
  those we surround ourselves with.
• Learn to identify the times when we are more
  likely to fall to groupthink and develop
  strategies for overcoming group think.

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Refusing to Listen

• Learn to listen to those you dont like.
• Growth as a critical thinker demands it.
• Refusing an idea because we dont like the person
  who offered it is an example of very poor
  reasoning.

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Impatience

• We live in a right now society.
• People rarely take time to think things through.
• Critical thinking takes time.
• Our conclusions should only be made after we have
  carefully reasoned through the options.

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Fallacies

• Keep in mind the danger of fallacies.
• Examples of fallacies
• Ad Hominem
• Slippery Slope
• Perfect Solution
• Ad Populum
• Strawman

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Perfect World

• Because we often wish that certain conclusions
  are always true, we may reasons as if they are
  always true, despite strong evidence to the
  contrary.
• We wish for a comfortable, fair world that does
  not exist.
• Belief in a perfect world can cause us to not
  consider the dangers of daily life.

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Stereotypes

• A stereotype occurs when we allege that a
  particular groups has a specific set of
  characteristics.
• If we believe stereotypes, we will not approach
  people and their ideas with the spirit of
  openness that is necessary from strong-sense
  critical thinking.
• Also, we will have an immediate bias toward any
  issue or controversy in which these people are
  involved. The stereotypes will have loaded the
  issue in advance, prior to reasoning.

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Stereotypes

• Why do we use stereotypes?
• They save time.
• They are easy and require very little reasoning.
• Bias.
• As critical thinkers, we should be curious and
  open. We should seek new information and judge
  the information only on its reasoning.

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Simplification

• Decisions and situations with simple answers
  allow us to move on rapidly and confidently to
  the next topic or life event.
• We naturally like dichotomous thinking because it
  is simple.
• Dichotomous thinking seeks to avoid careful
  reasoning and jump to the simplest conclusion
  available.

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Simplification

• While it is unrealistic to think we can consider
  all possible alternatives, hypotheses, or
  conclusions, we should resist the urge for
  simplification and dichotomous thinking.
• We should learn to look deeper into an issue
  before making a conclusion.

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Bias for Personal Beliefs

• Most of us believe that our personal beliefs will
  hold up under tough scrutiny.
• We are biased from the start of an exchange in
  favor of our current opinions and conclusions.
• Most of us are too confident in our own
  competence.
• We must remember that we are biased and that some
  of our personal beliefs may very well be based on
  poor reasoning.
• We should never permit ourselves to be so sure of
  anything that we stop searching for an improved
  version (better reasoning).

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Availability Heuristic

• Our tendency to rely on information and memories
  that are easily retrieved as a basis for our
  decision and judgments.
• The weight attached to a particular piece of
  evidence therefore depends more on its
  availability than its appropriateness as a
  reason.
• Recent events/experiences have a tendency to
  disproportionally bias our thinking.

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Availability Heuristic

• Avoid this by asking
• Is it typical?
• Is the experience we are relying on typical or is
  it just the most recent or the most vivid example
  in our brains?

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Wishful Thinking

• We are loyal to an idea when we prefer the
  concepts or facts we wish were true, rather than
  concepts or facts we know to be true.
• The best way to avoid wishful thinking is to
  practice the critical thinking skills you have
  learned in this class.

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