BUS403: Negotiations and Conflict Management (2016.A.01)

We have learned that we all stereotype people. We have maybe even extrapolated that we are a stereotype to others. We have also learned that we all have biases but that we typically only recognize bias in others and that some people may be biased for or against us based on a stereotype. We've also seen that stereotyping and biases may be hardwired into our brains, and therefore unavoidable. You might now be thinking, "but I want to judge people rationally, and not based on some silly bias I developed as a child", or "I want to understand the real value of the person across the table from me, rather than some shallow stereotypical judgment". How can we move beyond our own ingrained stereotypes and biases? We can do this by honing our critical thinking skills.

Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally. It includes the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking. Someone with critical thinking skills can do the following :

• understand the logical connections between ideas,
• identify, construct and evaluate arguments
• detect inconsistencies and common mistakes in reasoning
• solve problems systematically
• identify the relevance and importance of ideas
• reflect on the justification of one's own beliefs and values

Other definitions of critical thinking have been proposed and argued throughout history.

Critical thinking is not a matter of accumulating information. A person with a good memory who knows many facts is not necessarily good at critical thinking. A critical thinker can deduce consequences from what he knows, and he knows how to make use of information to solve problems and seek relevant sources of information to inform himself.

Critical thinking should not be confused with being argumentative or being critical of other people. Although critical thinking skills can expose fallacies and bad reasoning, critical thinking can also play an important role in cooperative reasoning and constructive tasks. Critical thinking can help us acquire knowledge, improve our theories, and strengthen arguments. We can use critical thinking to enhance work processes and improve social institutions.

Good critical thinking might be seen as the foundation of science and liberal democratic society. Science requires the critical use of reason in experimentation and theory confirmation. The proper functioning of a liberal democracy requires citizens who can think critically about social issues to inform their judgments about proper governance and to overcome biases and prejudice.

How to Develop the Critical Stance

The critical stance is the generalized ability and disposition to apply critical thinking to whatever you encounter, recognizing assumptions -- your own and others' -- applying that recognition to questioning information and situations, and considering their context.

1. Recognize assumptions

Each of us has a set of assumptions – ideas or attitudes or "facts" we take for granted – that underlies our thinking. Only when you're willing to look at these assumptions and realize how they color your conclusions can you examine situations, problems, or issues objectively.

Assumptions are based on many factors – physical, environmental, psychological, and experiential – that we automatically, and often unconsciously, bring to bear on anything we think about. One of the first steps in encouraging the critical stance is to try to make these factors conscious.

Sources of assumptions are numerous and overlapping, but the most important are:

• Senses. The impact of the senses is so elemental that we sometimes react to it without realizing we're doing so. You may respond to a person based on smells you're barely aware of, for instance.
• Experience. Each of us has a unique set of experiences, and they influence our responses to what we encounter. Ultimately, as critical thinkers, we have to understand both how past experience might limit our thinking in a situation and how we can use it to see things more clearly.
• Values. Values are deeply held beliefs – often learned from families, schools, and peers – about how the world should be. These "givens" may be difficult even to recognize, let alone reject. It further complicates matters that values usually concern the core issues of our lives: personal and sexual relationships, morality, gender and social roles, race, social class, and the organization of society, to name just a few.
• Emotion. Recognizing our emotional reactions is vital to keeping them from influencing our conclusions. Anger at child abusers may get in the way of our understanding the issue clearly, for example. We can't control whether emotions come up, but we can understand how we react to them.
• Self-interest. Whether we like it or not, each of us sometimes injects what is best for ourselves into our decisions. We have to be aware when self-interest gets in the way of reason or looking at the other interests in the situation.
• Culture. The culture we grew up in, the culture we've adopted, and the dominant culture in the society – all have their effects on us and push us into thinking in particular ways. Understanding how culture acts upon our and others' thinking makes it possible to look at a problem or issue in a different light.
• History. Community history, the history of our organization or initiative, and our own history in dealing with particular problems and issues will affect the way we think about the current situation.
• Religion. Our own religious backgrounds -- whether we still practice religion or not – may be more powerful than we realize in influencing our thinking.
• Biases. Very few of us, regardless of what we'd like to believe, are free of racial or ethnic prejudices of some sort, or of political, moral, and other biases that can come into play here.
• Prior knowledge. What we know about a problem or issue from personal experience, secondhand accounts, or theory shapes our responses to it. However, we have to be sure that what we "know" is in fact true and relevant to the issue at hand.
• Conventional wisdom. All of us have a large store of information "everybody knows" that we apply to new situations and problems. Unfortunately, the fact that everybody knows it doesn't make it right. Conventional wisdom is often too conventional: it usually reflects the simplest way of looking at things. We may need to step outside the conventions to look for new solutions.

This is often the case when people complain that "common sense" makes the solution to a problem obvious. Many people believe, for instance, that it is "common sense" that sex education courses for teens encourage them to have sex. The statistics show that, in fact, teens with adequate sexual information tend to be less sexually active than their uninformed counterparts.

2. Examine information for accuracy, assumptions, biases, or specific interests.

Some basic questions to examine information for accuracy, assumptions, biases, or specific interests are:

• What's the source of the information? Knowing where the information originates can tell you a lot about what it's meant to make you believe.
• Does the source generally produce accurate information?
• What are the source's assumptions about the problem or issue? Does the source have a particular interest or belong to a particular group that will allow you to understand what it believes about the issue the information refers to?
• Does the source have biases or purposes that would lead it to slant information in a particular way or to lie outright? Politicians and political campaigns often "spin" information so that it seems to favor them and their positions. People in the community may do the same or may "know" things that don't happen to be true.
• Does anyone, in particular, stand to benefit or lose if the information is accepted or rejected? To whose advantage is it if the information is taken at face value?
• Is the information complete? Are there important pieces missing? Does it tell you everything you need to know? Is it based on enough data to be accurate?

Making sure you have all the information can make a huge difference. Your information might be that a certain approach to this same issue worked well in a similar community. However, what you might not know or think to ask is whether there's a reason that the same approach wouldn't work in this community. If you investigated, you might find it had been tried and failed for reasons that would doom it again. You'd need all the information before you could reasonably address the issue.

• Is the information logically consistent? Does it make sense? Do arguments actually prove what they pretend to prove? Learning how to sort out logical and powerful arguments from inconsistent or meaningless ones is perhaps the hardest task for learners. Some helpful strategies here might include mock debates, where participants have to devise arguments for the side they disagree with; analysis of TV news programs, particularly those like "Meet the Press", where political figures defend their positions; and after-the-fact discussions of community or personal situations.

Just about anyone can come up with an example that "proves" a particular point: There's a woman down the block who cheats on welfare, so it's obvious that most welfare recipients cheat. You can't trust members of that ethnic group, because one of them stole my wallet.

Neither of these examples "proves" anything because it's based on only one instance, and there's no logical reason to assume it holds for a larger group. A former president was particularly fond of these kinds of "proofs", and as a result, often proposed simplistic solutions to complex social problems. Without information that's logically consistent and at least close to complete, you can't draw conclusions that will help you effectively address an issue.

• Is the information clear? Do you understand what you're seeing?
• Is the information relevant to the current situation? Information may be accurate, complete, logically consistent, powerful...and useless because it has nothing to do with what you're trying to deal with.

An AIDS prevention initiative, for instance, may find that a particular neighborhood has a large number of gay residents. However, if the HIV-positive rate in the gay community is nearly nonexistent, and the real AIDS problem in town is among IV drug users, the location of the gay community is irrelevant information.

• Most important, is the information true? Outright lies and made-up "facts" are not uncommon in politics, community work, employment applications, and other situations. Knowing the source and its interests, understanding the situation, and being sensibly skeptical can protect learners from acting on false information.

Source: Clover Park Technical College
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