CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS

Critical Thinking Skills



Critical Thinking Skills

Introduction

Critical thinking is applied rationality. It is a way of thinking that is based on principles of rationality. Critical thinking has been conceptualized as a set of skills that people can learn and apply in their everyday or professional lives. In fact, critical thinking and rationality are terms that are sometimes used interchangeably.

Critical thinking has its conceptual roots in education, philosophy, and psychology, and its definition varies depending on disciplinary focus, but thematically, these definitions are very similar. A working definition from psychology that is instructive for our purposes was offered by Wade and Tavris (2008, p. 7):

“Critical thinking is the ability and willingness to assess claims and make objective judgments on the basis of well-supported reasons and evidence rather than emotion or anecdote. Critical thinkers are able to look for flaws in arguments and to resist claims that have no support. They realize that criticizing an argument is not the same as criticizing the person making it, and they are willing to engage in vigorous debate about the validity of an idea. Critical thinking, however, is not merely negative thinking. It includes the ability to be creative and constructive—the ability to come up with alternative explanations for events, think of implications of research findings, and apply new knowledge to social and personal problems”.

Importance of Critical Thinking in Social Psychology

Critical thinking takes forms in the social psychology that have proven effective in evaluating the validity of propositions.  Generally, critical thinkers ask, in one form or another, the following seven questions:

What does the statement assert? What is asserted by implication?

What constitutes evidence for or against the proposition?

What is the evidence for the proposition? What is the evidence against it?

What other explanations might there be for the evidence?

To which circumstances does the proposition apply?

Are the circumstances currently of interest like the circumstances to which the proposition applies?

What motives might the proponent of the proposition have besides validity?

The proposition Small schools produce better citizens than large schools do can be examined as an illustrative example. The first step requires the critical thinker to define the terms of the proposition. In this example, the word better needs elaboration, but it is also unclear what is meant by citizen. Thus, the proponent may mean that better citizens are those who commit fewer crimes or perhaps those who are on friendly terms with a larger proportion of their communities than most citizens.

Critical thinkers are alert to hidden tautologies that are affected by the psychological factors, or to avoiding the fallacy of begging the question, in which begging is a synonym for pleading (as in pleading the facts in a legal argument) and question means the proposition at stake. It is fallacious to prove something by assuming it. In this example, students at smaller schools are bound to be on speaking terms with a higher proportion of members of the school community than are students at larger schools, so if that is the definition of better ...