Ch 13: Speed Bumps Flashcards
What are speed bumps?
Obstacles to thinking
Cognitive biases that are part of the human make-up
- You can overcome them if you slow down i.e. speedbump
- They are there whether you know it or not
- Even if you aware of speed-bumps that slow progress to becoming critical thinkers
Important to become aware of speed bumps that slow progress to becoming critical thinkers
Speed bump 1: Dual-processing theory
System 1 thinking: Snap judgments based on very little information, intuition or pattern recognition from prior experiences
No deep conscious thoughts, analysis
Non deliberate, no working memory
No effort or focus
Extremely quick but lots of room for error
Gives us the first answers right away such as feelings, emotions, confusion, etc.
System 2 thinking: Slow-thinking using brain to absorb and evaluate rationally
Conscious and self-regulated, focused, working memory, deliberate, and effortful
Working to analyze and evaluate our perceptions
Slower but more accurate
System 2 thinking intervenes with system 1 thinking by questioning our system 1 thinking
Questions to ask yourself to determine which system thinking you are using:
“What am I relying on as the support for my conclusions?”
“Why am I thinking what I’m thinking?”
Speed bump 2: Stereotypes
Any preliminary beliefs/habits of the mind
Because a person is a member of some group, they must have specific characteristics
Generalizing person based off of group identity
Epitome of system 1 thinking
Dangers:
Unable to approach their ideas with opennes
Immediate bias towards issue prior to reasoning
Short-circuits thinking and fails to model curiosity
Efficient but not effective
Ignoring valuable information by closing off our minds
Speed bump 3: Halo effect
Tendency to recognize one positive/negative trait of a person and generalizing that trait’s goodness/badness to the whole person for all aspects of their life
System 1 thinking, generalizing a person’s trait to their character
This is important because our perceptions of people shape how we evaluate and receive their arguments.
Speed bump 4: Belief perseverance
Confirmation bias “myside bias”:
You value/favor your opinions because they are yours
Tendency to only seek information that confirms our opinions/values
leads to weak-sense CT
Possibly most challenging of our biases for CT
Exaggerated sense of our own competence and bias that everyone else is biased but I am not
Speed bump 5: Egocentrism
Curse of knowledge: We forget what it’s like when we do not know what we know now
Not taking into consideration that other’s don’t know as much and being egocentric and only explaining it in “too scientific” terms (jargon)
Speed bump 6: Wishful thinking
Biggest single speed bump
We wish for things to be true so we form beliefs to match our make-belief world
Facts conforming to bias and we deny facts we don’t want to believe in
i.e. the outcome we wish for when we make our treatment decisions may be based on what we want to believe will happen rather than what evidence says will happen
Caution: Wish and hope are not the same thing
HOPE: implies a desired outcome that is possible or likely
WISH: implies a desired outcome that is not possible or likely, a false belief
