Critical Thinking Skills

Debunking Information and Recognizing Shortcomings

• Critical thinking skills are not adequately taught in high school.
• The lecture aims to help debunk information and recognize shortcomings in thinking skills.
• Humans have inherent biases and tend to see connections where they don't exist (correlation vs. causation).

Common Sense Quiz

• The Common Sense Quiz answers are all false.
• The quiz illustrates that common sense is unreliable in behavioral psychology.
• The answers are based on classic psychology research replicated thousands of times.
• Psychology is more reliable than common sense.

Sources of Information

• How do we learn about the world?

  • Internet, newspapers, magazines, television.
  • Parents, siblings, friends, teachers.
  • Own experiences (trial and error).
  • Culture.

Four Basic Categories of Information Sources

• Authority figures: Parents, siblings, teachers.
• Reasoning and judgment: Own thinking skills.
• Culture.
• Media: Wired in 24/7.

These four sources have been used since the dawn of mankind. The only significant change is the amount and speed of information through the media. Even before the printing press, news spread through gossip and town criers.

Common Sense Ways of Learning

• The lecture will explore how these sources may not always be reliable.

Authority Figures

• Things learned from authorities are generally accepted as true, but they can be wrong.
• Reflect on a time when this common sense way of learning was most influential (growing up years).

Folk Wisdom and Folk Cliches

• Folk wisdom is knowledge passed down through generations and ingrained as factual.
• Much of folk wisdom isn't true, though some may have a grain of truth.

Example: Catching a Cold

• Folk wisdom: Going out in cold, wet clothes will cause a cold.
• Reality: Bacteria, viruses, and pathogens cause sickness, not cold, wet clothes.

Anecdote about Father-in-Law

• The lecturer's father-in-law (Quiz) believed in the folk wisdom about catching a cold.
• The lecturer allowed his son to play in the rain, which upset his father-in-law.
• The lecturer sarcastically suggested making clothes out of swimsuit material to prevent colds.
• The point is that deeply held beliefs are hard to change, even with evidence.

Folk Cliches

• These are tidbits of folk wisdom used to say something instead of staring blankly.

• Examples:

  • Out of sight, out of mind, but absence makes the heart grow fonder.
  • Early bird catches the worm, but good things come to those who wait.
  • Opposites attract, but birds of a feather flock together.
  • Look before you leap, but throw caution to the wind.
  • You can't teach an old dog new tricks, but you're never too old to learn.
  • There's no such thing as a free lunch, but some of the best things in life are free.
  • Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you, an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth.

• Observations:

  • They're contradictory.
  • They're after-the-fact (post hoc) explanations.

• These cliches are not very useful from a scientific standpoint.

Bad Information and Bad Facts

• Authority figures can pass on bad information, not intentionally.
• Elementary school teachers may not be experts on everything they teach.

Example: Brightest Star

• The lecturer's third-grade teacher said the North Star was the brightest star.
• The teacher was wrong. The brightest star in the nighttime sky is Sirius.

Columbus Example

• Commonly taught: Columbus set out to prove the world wasn't flat.
• The problem: A flat earth wouldn't match coastal city observations (ships appearing over the horizon).
• Columbus sailed in 1492. The flat earth idea didn't appear in textbooks until 1832 and was copied for nearly 150 years.

Question Authority

• Question everything, even the lecturer.
• Feel free to ask questions and challenge statements.

Checking Information Online

• Before sharing something that seems incredible, check it out.
• Use websites like snopes.com to investigate claims and rumors.
• Snopes.com has been fact-checking since the 1990s and provides sources.

Logic, intuition, or thinking skills

• poor unless trained in logic.
• We see connections that are not there
• Biases built into us that make us see thing incorrectly.
• A logic course will help you make big decisions in life and realize shortcomings.

Jumping to Conclusions

• Coming to a conclusion without all the facts
• This is a built in rental short cut
• If its costs time, money, and heartache, then you should realize if you're doing this

Marry Somebody of Your Same Skin Color

• Research was done that "interracial marriages are five times more likely to end in divorce than same race marriages."

• Is there Jumping to Conclusions in this

  • More facts need to discovered, skin color may have nothing to do with it.
  • The research was down in the south and that had an effect.
  • culture period or religious beliefs or maybe had to do with the fact that they only had, you know, 10 people in the study.

• This can be found in the good research conclude.

• One should find you're going to marry and live with for the rest of your life, hopefully, you know, find somebody who's transparent

The self serving bias

• This is a personal bias where we interpret things in a way that make us look good to ourselves And as a consequence, often make others look less good.
• We rewrite things we've done and lived through in such a way that we look better than we were actually probably were in that event.
• This is always in every interaction, real or imagined.
• affects everything when it involves you and another person or you and other people
• It's there on your part in your head. It's there and theirs too affecting the situation.

Example: Driving down the road someone cuts you off

• The self serving bias is that, those other people is doing those things because they are terrible person.
• When you do that, its always an accident, you're never at fault.

The Slippery Slope

• If the first in a series of events then all possible steps or events will occur.

Smoking, Then Jail

• Smoking cigarettes will lead to mary j, which then leads to stronger drugs, then to jail and then they will catch AIDS, then they will die
• Bad Logics, because this a only a possible path that one can go down.

Correlation vs causation

• As ice cream sales increase, so does violent crime is a true statistic

• Also the more passengers get paid, the more topless bars their are.

• What are the explanation for these 2 examples?

  • well a third variable
  • Ice cream and violent crime - hot summer or vacation
  • If not that then population

• So Correlation does not mean causation

Culture

• Culture is a big one, this category is hard because we often don't even think about it
• Everyone everywhere has a culture, and that gave up a cultural ethnocentrism
• Then results in us believing things to be true and correct but not being true or correct.
• You have to have an open mind and realize that the people in other places may so things differently and think differently just because you think one way don't do the people in other countries think that way

Cultural Bias

• In this country, we drive on the right side of the road, but in Great Britain, they drive on the left side, that is cultural bias.

In Politics

• Please take an anthropology course, because every president has had one cultural screw up.
• Even facial expressions are not translated from one culture to the next. but the one that has been translated is smiling and crying

Bush anecdote

• George Bush was given the sign of peace with his hand in but in other countries the sign actually means he's flipping you off.