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Which Thinking Skill or Skills will Get You to Your Goal?
CAN CRITICAL THINKING SAVE THE WORLD?
Thinking is like loving and dying:
Each must do it for him (her) self.
—Anonymous
Congratulations! Because of your expertise in critical thinking, you landed a high-level management position with one of the world’s largest international chocolate companies. Sadly, you received news that child labor is being used to produce cocoa. Consumers have no idea how complex it is to get cocoa to market. Your company has 40,000 separate suppliers in Africa. An international work force is dependent on the success of your company to pay their bills, and consumers seem to care more about getting high-quality chocolate than the use of forced child labor. Changes in your production methods will drive up the price of your product, which will probably reduce sales and consequently profits, but it is hard to estimate how sales will vary as a function of price because your company has never had a single large price increase. The ethics are clear—you will not continue to use child labor. But your ethics cloud when you learn that many of these children are supporting their families, who might starve without their income. The problem is real-world messy. It involves many of the skills presented throughout this book. How do you tackle a problem of this size and severity? (Case adapted from Chatterjee & Elias, 2007)
This scenario is a case study that is used in business schools, but it is based on an investigative series of child labor in the production of cocoa that was authored by Sumana Chatterjee (2008). She described her experiences: “My job was to spark the thinking process” (para 2). This sort of messy real-world problem is exactly the sort that requires critical thinking. Apply what you have learned in this book to this problem and the many others that you will face as a responsible adult in the 21st century. You need to frame the problem in multiple ways and then determine which thinking skills will help you get to a desired goal.
As you worked your way through this book, you learned how to use a wide variety of critical thinking skills; now all you have to do to become a better thinker is use them appropriately. Each chapter dealt primarily with one category of critical thinking skills—using likelihoods to reduce uncertainty, analyzing and making arguments, solving problems with a variety of hints and prompts, and reasoning with quantifiers, to name just a few. The separation of critical thinking skills into categories was necessary so that the skills could be learned and practiced in manageable units. Unfortunately, critical thinking does not break into neat and separate categories, and mixed sorts of skills are needed in most situations. Memory must always be accessed, the type of representation and the words we use influence how we think, evidence always needs to be considered, thinking must be logical, and so on. As you go through life, you will need to use all of the skills that you practiced and improved in each of the chapters. But, most importantly, you need to adopt the attitudes and dispositions of a critical thinker. You need to find problems that others have missed, support conclusions with good evidence, and work persistently on a host of problems.
It may be useful to think about critical thinking skills as a tool box filled with many skills. The trick, if there is one, is to select the right skill for the right task. A framework for thinking is proposed to guide that process.
Thinking … is continuous, a series of informed improvisations more like those of a jazz musician than the playing of a classical musician performing a set piece of music from a score.
—Richard M. Restak (1988, p. 233)
Unfortunately, there is no simple “how to” formula that can be used in every situation that calls for critical thought. You already know about the importance of planning as one of the attitudes or predispositions for critical thinking, but knowing that it is important to plan is of little value if you do not know how to plan. Consider the following advice about wilderness survival that appeared in a phone directory:
Wilderness Survival
Things you must NOT do:
• Wear brand new boots.
• Leave an open fire unattended.
• Panic. If you meet trouble, stop and think.
I am sure that the first two recommendations are excellent, but I am less confident about the value of telling someone to think without any instructions about how to go about it. Presented below is a general, all-purpose framework or guide that can be used to direct the thinking process. It is not a sure-fire guarantee to good thinking (there are none), but it is a way of getting started and ensuring that the executive processes needed in thinking—planning, monitoring, and evaluating—are being used in a reflective manner. You can probably guess why these are called executive processes. They function like the “boss” in a busy office by directing the flow of work and deciding where to put the available resources. The framework is a series of questions, some of which may be repeated several times during the thinking process, which are general enough to be useful in a wide variety of applications, including reasoning from premises, analyzing arguments, testing hypotheses, solving problems, estimating probabilities, making decisions, and thinking creatively.
Although the framework will remain the same for all thinking tasks, the actual skills used will vary with the nature of the task. The proposed framework is an adaptation of the problem-solving procedures originally proposed by the brilliant mathematician and scholar George Polya in 1945. Polya’s model was presented in the chapter on problem solving.
As you progressed through the chapters in this book, you gained experience in applying this framework in different contexts and different knowledge domains. The thinking skills you acquired as you worked through this book will transfer to other contexts if you acquire the habit of using the framework. It is an easy-to-use guide that, through repeated practice, should become automatic. The following questions guide the thought process:
Critical thinking was defined as the use of those cognitive skills or strategies that increase the probability of a desirable outcome. This term is used to describe thinking that is purposeful, reasoned, and goal directed. The first step in improving thinking is to be clear about the goal or goals. What is it that you want to do? Real life problems are messy. Sometimes there are multiple goals, and sometimes you will return to this question several times, as your understanding of the goal will often change after you have worked for a while. A clearly articulated goal will provide direction to the thinking process and allow you to make better decisions about the skills you need to use. In the course of thinking about real world problems, you may need to change direction and redefine the problem and the desired outcome several times, but it is still important to have an outcome in mind to provide some focus. After all, if you do not know where you are going, you can never be sure whether you have arrived. In the problem in the opening scenario, an initial goal might have been to produce high-quality cocoa at a reasonable price without using child labor. But after learning more about the situation, the goals might shift to include the idea that you also need to help the families of the children from starving when you terminate the children’s jobs. Complex real-world problems have a large variety of possible goals. The skills needed to reach these goals might include deciding between a set of possible alternative solutions, generating a novel solution, synthesizing information, evaluating the validity of evidence, determining the probable cause of some events, considering the credibility of an information source, and quantifying uncertainty.
Are you making a decision about whether to have a heart transplant or what flavor ice cream to select from the corner store? Impulsive thinking about ice cream flavors is not a bad thing and does not require critical thinking; life and death decisions do. Not everything we do in life requires critical thought, but many of life’s important decisions do. The way you identify the goal should help you plan the time and effort required by the situation.
This is the starting point for directed thinking. Although this may seem fairly straightforward now, when you actually use this framework on real problems, you will find that you may have to return to the “knowns” several times as you interpret and reinterpret the situation. Some information will be known with certainty; other information may be only probably true or partially known. This step will also include recognizing gaps in what is known and the need for further information gathering. For example, you would want to know if the children are really being exploited or whether they work perhaps two hours a day making a good wage and spend another five hours in a quality school. (Sounds like wishful thinking, but you would need to know about the work conditions in your manufacturing plants before you can derive a solution to the problem of child labor.) There will be much data gathering and, along with it, considerations about whether the information is credible.
Which Thinking Skill or Skills will Get You to Your Goal?
Once you have some idea of where you are (the knowns or givens) and where you are going (the goal or purpose), you are better able to plan goal-directed thinking processes. Knowing how to get from where you are to where you want to be is the power of critical thinking. Just as there are many different possible goals, there are many different strategies for attaining them. Let’s consider the “thinking is like a map” analogy that was presented in the first chapter because it can help to clarify some abstract concepts by making them more concrete. Suppose you are about to go on a trip to visit two old friends. One has become a Buddhist monk and lives high on a mountaintop in the Himalayas. The other has become a surfing champion and is living on the beautiful island of Hawaii. You would have to use a different method of travel to reach each destination; one involves scaling a mountain, the other deciding between a plane or boat (assuming that you are not presently on the mountaintop or in Hawaii). Similarly, you will have to use different thinking skills with different types of thought processes.
This step will involve generating and selecting the appropriate strategy to reach the goal. How can you be sure that no child labor was used to produce the products you purchase from all of your suppliers? There will need to be independent verification from trusted sources. Can you find adult family members who can learn how to produce cocoa after the children are removed from the manufacturing plants? Maybe you can set up an on-site school so the children who are now working can easily get an education that prepares them for their adult life.
A concern with accuracy is probably the best predictor of success. Does your solution make sense? Did you find a way to eliminate all child labor from your own plant and that of your suppliers, while keeping production costs low enough to sell your chocolate at a reasonable price and while being sure that the children’s families can succeed?
The definition of critical thinking that was used throughout this book involved the conscious use of critical thinking skills to achieve a desirable outcome. Does the idea of a “desirable outcome” seem more appropriate now that you have read this book? Schneider (2007, p. 269) provided a thoughtful analysis of what is meant by a desirable outcome:
Some of the decisions you and I will make will be bad bets because we lacked important information and failed to use that at our disposal. But a person who wanted to win at the game of life would certainly want to act of the basis of the most accurate beliefs he could muster. Thus, the ultimate answer to the question of why beliefs matter is that those whose belief machines lead them astray will lose more of life’s bets. Misery may love company, but it positively adores a corrupt belief machine.
Does the working definition of critical thinking seem like it captured the multiple dimensions of complexity that are inherent in critical thinking? Can you and will you use some of the thinking skills in your own life—to make decisions, read about and plan research, understand the structure of a written passage, think creatively, remember more effectively, and more? Are you more likely to have a desirable outcome because of something that you learned? Have you adopted at least some of the attitudes of a critical thinker?
Can Critical Thinking Save the World?
The greatest threat to the world is ideological fanaticism, By ideological fanaticism I mean the unshakeable conviction that one’s belief system and that of other in-group members is always right and righteous and that others’ belief systems are always wrong and wrong-headed.
—Scott Lilienfeld (2007, para. 3)
Lilienfeld (2007) asked if psychology can save the world. I am changing his question by substituting “critical thinking” for “psychology” because I believe that it is closer in meaning to what he meant. Can people learn to think better, and in doing so, resist some of the greatest horrors of the last century—Hitler’s Nazism, Mao Tse Tsung’s Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge? The answer to this question would require a grand experiment—teaching the skills of critical thinking and then seeing if we have a better world.
Even if we can never have a definitive answer to this question, there are many people around the world who believe that critical thinking can be “an effective (partial) antidote against ideological fanaticism” (Lilienfeld, 2007, para. 5). As I write this final chapter, much of world is outraged over the shooting of a young girl by the Taliban in Pakistan. Her crime? She spoke out in support of education for girls. Taseer (2012, para. 11) called her attackers “merchants of hatred,” who fear education because an educated citizenry would resist the hate that is being taught instead. He eloquently explained that “Terrorism bears within it the seeds of its own destruction. What schools with a good syllabus can offer is the timeless and universal appeal of critical thinking. This is what the Taliban are most afraid of. Critical thinking has the power to defuse terrorism; it is an internal liberation that jihadism simply cannot offer.”
Happily, there are some data to support the idea that we might avoid or reduce the severity of ideological fanaticism. The Holocaust was “unprecedented in its cruelty”; yet even in the nightmare that was World War II, there were incredible acts of heroism and altruism (Oliner, 1992). Rescuers risked their own lives and that of their family members to save Jews and members of other persecuted groups from a certain death. How did they differ from “bystanders” who did nothing but watch the raging carnage taking place around them? This is a complex question; Oliner, who compared rescuers to bystanders on numerous dimensions, found that the rescuers encouraged independent thinking in their own children and seem to have learned this disposition from their parents. Similarly, a recent study showed teens who were adept at making arguments when discussing contentious topics with their parents (e.g., grades, drugs) were more independent thinkers that other teens and were also better able to resist drug use (Allen, Chango, Szwedo, Schad, & Marston, 2012). It just may be that instruction in critical thinking can save the world, at least in some small part.
Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don’t let our people have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?
—Joseph Stalin (1879–1933)
As you look back on your journey through this book, I hope that you will recall that there is a large body of research literature showing that thinking skills and dispositions can improve with specific instruction designed to enhance critical thinking (e.g., Abrami et al., 2008). When critical thinking skills are learned and applied appropriately, people can become better thinkers. And perhaps, most hopefully, the ability to think critically just might help us achieve a better world. As you face the decisions and problems of living, I hope that you can use the knowledge gained from this book to achieve a meaningful life. You are what and how you think. Be sure to act on your thoughts and to use them to advance yourself and to improve even a small corner of the world. Think well and with great wisdom. The future depends on it.
Woman to large creature: “You’ve taught me how to think.” (Issue Publication Date: 09/12/1988, Edward Koren / The New Yorker Collection / www.CartoonBank.com.)