Critical Thinking Flashcards
To improve your ability to think critically about issues and decisions
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
When we know little very little about something we tend to view it simplistically and assume we know everything about it. Experts tend to know what they don’t know. The more you know the more you know you don’t know.
Confirmation Bias
This is the systematic bias to prefer or believe that ideas with confirm our own views are true. It is a critical error in thinking and one we must be conscious of at all times. For example , when we are doing research we will tend to to try and find sources which confirm our own views, one’s with we normally form very quickly. To avoid this we have to constantly play devils advocate to all the views there are. We are cognitively lazy and normally there are more than two ways of thinking about something.
Self-serving Biases
We attribute successes and positive outcomes to our doing, basking in our own glory when things go right; but, when we face failure and negative outcomes, we tend to attribute these events to other people or contextual factors outside ourselves.
The False Consensus Effect
Once you (truly) understand a new piece of information, that piece of information is now available to you and often becomes seemingly obvious. It might be easy to forget that there was ever a time you didn’t know this information and so, you assume that others, like yourself, also know this information: the
Optimistic/Pessimistic Bias
As you probably guessed from the name, we have a tendency to overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes, particularly if we are in good humour, and to overestimate the likelihood of negative outcomes if we are feeling down or have a pessimistic attitude.
The Sunk Cost Fallacy
We generally believe that when we put something in, we should get something out – whether it’s effort, time or money. With that, sometimes we lose… and that’s it – we get nothing in return. A sunk cost refers to something lost that cannot be recovered. Our aversion to losing (Kahneman, 2011) makes us irrationally cling to the idea of ‘regaining’, even though it has already been lost (known in gambling as chasing the pot
The Decline Bias
This may result from something I’ve mentioned repeatedly in my posts – we don’t like change. People like their worlds to make sense, they like things wrapped up in nice, neat little packages. Our world is easier to engage when things make sense to us. When things change, so must the way in which we think about them; and because we are cognitively lazy we try our best to avoid changing our thought processes.
Backfire Effect
We wish to avoid losing and other negative outcomes – for example, one’s idea is being challenged or rejected (i.e. perceived as being made out to be ‘wrong’) and thus, they may hold on tighter to the idea than they had before. However, there are caveats to the Backfire Effect – for example, we also tend to abandon a belief if there’s enough evidence against it with regard to specific facts.
The Fundamental Attribution Error
This is the tendency to attribute mistakes or failures to the person themselves and to their character. There may be many other reasons for someones failing then their personality or characteristics which we don’t know.
The In-group Bias
You might think that you’re unbiased, impartial and fair, but we all succumb to this bias, having evolved to be this way. That is, from an evolutionary perspective, this bias can be considered an advantage – favouring and protecting those similar to you, particularly with respect to kinship and the promotion of one’s own line.
The Forer Effect
If we can’t make sense of the word, we would have no pre-existing routine to fall back on and we’d have to think harder to contextualise new information. With that, if there are gaps in our thinking of how we understand things, we will try to fill those gaps in with what we intuitively think makes sense, subsequently reinforcing our existing schema(s). Specifically, the Forer Effect refers to the tendency for people to accept vague and general personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to themselves without realizing that the same description could be applied to just about everyone else
Magic Number 8
In critical thinking, the Magic Number 8 refers to searching for and identifying at least eight of the most compelling pieces of evidence (four for and four against a particular perspective). Searching for the Magic Number 8 is a great way of overcoming cherry-picking evidence from biased Google searches
