I drone on and on sometimes about how important critical thinking skills are, so I thought that I’d try something new this time around. Let’s take a look at some common mistakes people make in their thinking, and you decide if I’m holding a mirror up to you.

1. When you fail at something, do you blame the same person that you credit when you succeed?

It’s common for most of us to take personal credit for our success, but look for someone else to blame when we fail. By only taking responsibility for our success, we tend to feel better about ourselves. The cost of this self-serving bias, however, is that we can start to believe the myth we’re creating about ourselves. Taken to extremes, some people self-handicap by going out of their way to promote external factors that can lead to their own failures in an effort to avoid taking personal responsibility.

2. Do you think events like school shootings or terrorist attacks are fairly common?

Upsetting events like attacks at schools or overseas are actually very rare, but when they do occur, they can become more accessible in your memory, making it easier for us to misjudge how often or likely such events are to recur. This is known as the “availability heuristic”, and it’s a common source of biased or distorted judgement. One way out of this trap is to consider the influence of information sources on your actions and decisions. Are you acting based on information you recently received? If so – consider the source and how reliable it is before you proceed.

3. Do you lean on your stereotypes too heavily?

Stereotyping is pretty common since everyone uses stereotyping to some degree. Stereotypes are a sort of mental shorthand where we attribute the features or characteristics of a class to individuals we see as class members. For example, Pit Bull terriers are stereotyped as aggressive dogs, and if someone comes across my pit bull, they may conclude that he’s aggressive before getting to know him better.

Sometimes stereotypes are useful. For example, relying on a stereotype for aggressive animals might keep us from inadvertently hugging grizzly bears. Relying on stereotypes to make decisions about specific people, however, can be particularly harmful. Remember that stereotypes are there to help us think more efficiently. Sometime, however, you have to think a lot (which can be inefficient) – and in those cases, your stereotypes won’t help.

4. You knew that Obama would win the election, and the Steelers would win the Superbowl.

No you didn’t.

Neither of these instances were a sure bet, and you could argue that at least one was improbable. So why do you think you knew? Because you learned the outcome afterwards, and now you’re misjudging how probable these events really were before hand. This is known as hindsight bias, and it tricks us into the belief that we have some special knowledge of future events. In fact, we don’t – we have regular knowledge of past events.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to examine critical thinking and I’d like to get your input as well. For starters, I’ll just take on the term “Critical Thinking” itself. In later posts, I’ll cover how critical thinking is related to science and effective argumentation.

The term “Critical Thinking” starts with the word “Critical”, which has more than one definition. The most common definition of critical is negative. For example, if I wanted to find fault with your poor fashion choices as you shop at WalMart, I might be said to be critical of your coffee-stained wife-beater and flip-flops. This isn’t the same sense of the word critical (and, by the way, if that’s how you dress at WalMart, please stop).

Thinking, on the other hand, is a verb – and it is the act of applying mental effort or reason to something. Thinking isn’t the same as day-dreaming or wishing. When you are thinking, you are purposefully exerting effort, and your attention, to reason about a specific object, problem or goal.

So there you have it: Critical Thinking is essentially the process of skillfully applying your mental effort or reasoning to something. Indeed, when we talk about critical thinking being something rare, we’re really saying that critical thinking skills are apparently rare. So, in the general vernacular, there is already a consensus that critical thinking is a skill.

And that makes it something that you can learn or improve through practice and exercise.

One issue with critical thinking – as with all thinking – is that it’s invisible. You could well be the most clever, most critical thinker on the planet, but nobody would know it in the absence of some observable evidence of those skills. I’d like to suggest that critical thinking skills are certainly worth learning and practicing, but more than that, we have to become good at implementing those skills in our writing, speech and decision making. This is the part of the topic that fascinates me: how we go from a set of thinking skills to a set of real-life actions that would lead others to suspect that you possess those skills.

Let me know what you think about this.