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How to Improve Critical Thinking
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The right way to improve critical thinking
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Debating problems
Many well-known problems of human reasoning disappear once you get a group of people together and let them talk about it.
It's a good way to see your ideas refuted or let stronger ideas win the day. Although there’s a risk of group think and conformity pressures, if you take a large and diverse enough group, you’re more likely to be exposed to the best reasoning, which will tend to win out over the majority opinion.
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Critical thinking...
...doesn’t happen because you’ve studied some abstract logical form and come to valid deductions.
It happens because you know enough about how the world works to rule out certain possibilities as being unlikely or impossible.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Six levels of critical thinkers
Researchers identified six predictable levels of critical thinkers:
- The unreflective thinker
- The challenged thinker
- The beginner thinker
- The practicing think...
The Unreflective Thinker
These are people who don't reflect on thinking nor consider the consequences of not thinking. Their prejudices and misconceptions lead them.
They do not consistently apply standards like accuracy, relevance, precision, and logic.
The Challenged Thinker
People at this intellectual stage are aware of the importance of thinking and know that the lack of thinking can result in major issues.
- They acknowledge that their own mental processes might have many flaws but are unable to identify all the weaknesses.
- They may spot some instances of their own self-deception.
- They may have a sense that proper thinking involves navigating assumptions, inferences, and points of view, but only on a basic level.
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We’re swayed by anecdotes
We’re overconfident
We overestimate our comprehension of the science.
Part of the problem seems to be that we infer our understanding of scientific text based on how well we have comprehended the language used. This “fluency bias” can also apply to science lectures when it is delivered by an engaging speaker.
We’re seduced by graphs
One study found that participants were far more likely to support new evidence when it had a graphic visualisation of the correlational evidence than if they had read the same evidence without a graphic.
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Talking To Yourself Aloud
Speaking out loud comes out instinctively in many of us while memorizing a text or while developing an idea.
While it may look and sound unusual to the onlookers, speaking to yours...
Ideas Come With Speaking
From Ancient Greece and Rome to 19th century Germany, the idea of using speech as a thinking methodology has been observed and documented.
Constructive thinking requires free speech, as speech then becomes a creative process that gives birth to thoughts.
Self-Affirmation
Positive psychology has a popular tool for self-empowerment: spoken self-affirmation. Self-talk increases one’s involvement in the process and contributes to one’s emotional regulation and motivation.
Popular books on the law of attraction and the power of the subconscious mind highlight the fact that speaking aloud is a direct way of attracting something from the universe, whether it is favourable to us or not.