5 ways to improve your critical thinking
The truth is, critical thinking skills are learned and refined over time, helping you make better decisions, process information more effectively, and express yourself more clearly. By honing your critical thinking skills, you give yourself a boost in your personal and professional life.
So what exactly is critical thinking?
And how can you become a better critical thinker, starting today? This simple guide will provide you with a great place to start, examining the definition of critical thinking and working on five methods to improve it.
What is critical thinking?
Simply put, critical thinking is about analyzing, processing, and making sense of information with care. Although often taught as part of a philosophy course (and has its roots in the work of Plato and Aristotle), critical thinking skills can be usefully applied to any problem, area, question or concept.
It involves keeping a close eye on your own thoughts, paying attention to where they come from and how they follow each other, and it requires some openness.
In particular, good critical thinkers do their best to be neutral about their own thoughts, identifying biases and prejudices, and then correcting them (we'll look at biases in more depth later).
What's more, the latest research clearly shows that critical thinking has major benefits for all areas of reasoning. For example, a person with a critical mind can do the following:
Ask relevant, clear questions with a precise and limited scope
Methodically collect information and assess it accurately
Reach well-supported conclusions and weigh them against the counter-evidence
Display a constant awareness of the limits of their own skills, watch out for things they do not understand or find it difficult to accept
Communicate with others productively and impartially to achieve results, even when tackling complex issues.
As can be seen from the above, critical thinking exercises are not only useful for your career (for example, tasks such as conducting meetings and giving presentations). They also promote better relationships, allowing you to overcome conflict in a faster and more self-aware way.
5 ways to improve your critical thinking
Now, as stated above, you weren't just born with innate critical thinking skills. Yes, they are easier to acquire for some people than for others, but in principle they can be grown in anyone. This means that if you want to be a good critical thinker, you have to remember that becoming a critical thinker is all about practice. Imagine it as similar to physical training! There are certain muscles that you need to build over time.
The following five exercises will all help you in the critical thinking process. They are all about making simple but powerful changes to your cognition and monitoring them over time.
In addition to using these techniques, remember that any type of new learning is also useful for critical thinking. Every time you read something new, join a class, or tackle a difficult book, you become a sharper, smarter thinker.
1. Ask basic questions
It's tempting to imagine good critical thinkers asking scholarly, convoluted questions when trying to solve a problem. However, the truth is in fact the opposite. The more you master your critical thinking, the more fundamental and clear your questions become. To improve your questioning when solving problems (and thus improve your critical thinking skills), be sure to break down the questions.
Suppose you encounter a new problem, at work or in life, and you don't know what to do. Start by asking the following questions:
What information do you already have on this problem?
How do you know the above information?
that l is your goal and what are you trying to find, prove, disprove, support or criticize?
What are you perhaps ignoring?
These types of questions encourage you to get right to the heart of a problem, asking it to find simple solutions before taking on the complexity.
If that helps, try writing down the answers to the four questions above when you are faced with a problem, to help you remember your process as you go through it. You can use the same strategy to try to coax someone else through a problem when they present it to you.
Again, this shows how important critical thinking is from an interpersonal perspective, not just from a cognitive perspective.
2. Be aware of your mental process
People who assume that they are good critical thinkers often turn their analytical skills outward, arrogantly criticizing others. However, being a truly skilled thinker involves a lot more soul-searching.
In particular, you want to keep an eye on your own mental process; where it started, what it looks like and where it is going. Our brains are incredibly impressive and can sort through information with incredible speed, but this lightning-fast work can encourage us to ignore important factors.
Our brains use heuristics, much like cognitive shortcuts, to make quick inferences about what is going on around us. In many cases, these heuristics give reliable results and help us move forward in the world. In other cases, they take the form of unreliable biases that lead us down the wrong path.
No matter how smart and thoughtful you are, if you want to be a good critical thinker, you have to accept that you have such biases, and you have to learn to watch out for them. Get in the habit of asking yourself what you're assuming and why, and check things like unnecessary stereotypes. Becoming more aware of your own biases is the first step in rewriting these parts of your thinking (although even the best critical thinker will never be entirely free from biases).
3. Adjust your point of view
As noted above, being more mindful of your own biases is a great help in critical thinking. However, this is only the first step in a gradual change of perspective.
One useful thing you can do is read the literature on bias and how it works. For example, in the field of "CV studies", researchers show how identical CVs can receive different evaluations depending on whether the name placed at the top sounds masculine or feminine, foreign or familiar, and so on.
Meanwhile, there's all kinds of interesting work on how situational factors influence our seemingly essential character traits. For example, we make different decisions based on factors like hunger, the color of a room, whether we should climb a staircase, etc.
Just reading about these biases and heuristics can help you adjust your perspective. Another thing you can do to help is to deliberately expose your mind to other ways of thinking. Instead of sticking to your favorite sources of information, read a little more broadly. Pick books from authors outside of your culture. Deliberately engage in empathy exercises that put you in the shoes of a stranger. All of these actions make you a better thinker.
4. Think inside out
Thinking inside out is another fascinating and effective technique, especially when you are stuck trying to solve a difficult problem.
The basic idea is that you reverse what you think you know. So if you think it's pretty obvious that A is causing B, ask yourself “But what if B was causing A?”. This is the structure of the famous case of the chicken and the egg.
5.Law of Attraction
You first think that you are sure that the hen comes first because the egg has to be laid by the hen. However, once you consider that the chicken itself must have come from somewhere, it's not that clear anymore.
Thinking backwards won't always give you an immediate solution to a problem. However, this prevents you from seeing the problem the same way, which is often all you need to get started on the road to success. Plus, reversing the supposed sense of causation is a particularly useful tip in relationships, which discourages blame.
For example, you might think that you acted the way you did because of the way your partner spoke, but what if they think they spoke differently because of the way you acted.
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