Creativity and Critical Thinking

What Are Critical Thinking Skills and Why You Need Them?

Before we jump into defining critical thinking skills, let’s run a quick
experiment.

We’ll try to find out if drinking coffee is good for you.

First, google “reasons not to drink coffee.”

Wow! Decreased anxiety (source), healthier teeth (source), weight loss

(source), and a healthier heart (source)!

Oh God! I’ll never touch a cup of coffee again!

How about “reasons to drink coffee?”

Lower rates of depression (source), memory boost (source), longevity

(source), and, wait for it, a healthier heart (source).

Oh well. I’ll never trust the Internet again.

The twist? These are not some random unsupported online claims. There’s legit,
peer-reviewed research that backs up EVERY single one of the above findings.

So how do you reconcile these contradictory claims?

By thinking critically.

What does that even mean, though?

What Is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is the ability to think in an organized and rational manner in order
to understand connections between ideas and/or facts. It helps you decide what
to believe in. In other words, it’s “thinking about thinking”—identifying, analyzing,
and then fixing flaws in the way we think.

How to Be a Critical Thinker?

To become one takes time, practice, and patience. But something you can start
doing today to improve your critical thinking skills is apply the 7 steps of critical
thinking to every problem you tackle—either at work or in your everyday life.

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Plus, there are some critical thinking questions to help you out at each of the
steps.

Steps of Critical Thinking

1. Identify the problem or question.

Be as precise as possible: the narrower the issue, the easier it is to find solutions
or answers.

2. Gather data, opinions, and arguments.

Try to find several sources that present different ideas and points of view.

3. Analyze and evaluate the data.

Are the sources reliable? Are their conclusions data-backed or just
argumentative? Is there enough information or data to support given
hypotheses?

4. Identify assumptions.
Are you sure the sources you found are unbiased? Are you sure you weren’t
biased in your search for answers?

5. Establish significance.
What piece of information is most important? Is the sample size sufficient? Are
all opinions and arguments even relevant to the problem you’re trying to solve?

6. Make a decision/reach a conclusion.

Identify various conclusions that are possible and decide which (if any) of them
are sufficiently supported. Weigh strengths and limitations of all possible
options.

7. Present or communicate.
Once you’ve reached a conclusion, present it to all stakeholders.

Let’s go back to our coffee example and examine it critically, point-by-point.

1. The problem in question was: “is drinking coffee good for you?”

This approach is way to broad.

First of all, what does “good” even mean?

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Secondly, we don’t know if we’re talking about long- or short-term effects of

drinking coffee. It’s also possible that drinking coffee might benefit some aspects
of your health while being detrimental to others.

So, let’s narrow down the problem to: “is drinking coffee good for your heart?”

2. Listed above, there are only two pieces of research on the impact of
drinking coffee on your heart.

The first one suggests that drinking coffee “could account for premature deaths
in the region of 14% for coronary heart disease and 20% for stroke.”

According to the second one, “moderate coffee consumption was associated

with a lower prevalence of the Coronary Artery Disease.”

We’ve made two other major mistakes in reasoning: first of all, two sources only
are not enough.

Secondly, we haven’t taken into account that heart is a very complex organ: just
like it is the case with the rest of our body, coffee might be good for some of its
functions while bad for others.

3. Both articles cited have appeared in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals.

But—

The first one has been based on literature review only; no original studies.

The second one, although conducted in a large (25.000 participants) sample of

men and women, includes only Korean population—people whose hearts can be
affected by other factors such as diet or climate.

4. While the two sources don’t appear biased, we were.

We based our initial Google searches on assumptions: “reasons not to drink

coffee” (assuming: coffee is bad for our health) and “reasons to drink coffee”
(assuming: coffee is worth drinking).

Google’s search algorithms made sure we found articles in line with our
assumptions.

So...

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5. Considering all of the above, we can positively state that the information
we gathered was not significant for solving the initially stated problem.

6. The only conclusion that can be reached is: according to the data we
gathered, drinking coffee might or might not be good for our hearts,
depending on many factors and variables we failed to take into account.

7. Even if the conclusion is “the question cannot be answered at this point,”

it’s still worth presenting and communicating.

It’s good to know what the limitations of our knowledge on a given topic are.

The point is—

It’s really hard to be sure of something.

And critical thinking skills are necessary for us to accept the flaws in our
reasoning and gaps in our knowledge, and take advantage of them!

Why Are Critical Thinking Skills Important?

When you think critically, you’ll constantly challenge what seems given. Say, in
your job, even if something appears to be functioning properly, critical thinking
will help you try and identify new, better solutions.

Critical thinking skills are the cornerstone of self-development and

improvement. That’s why they’re so critical to have in today’s job market.

Top Critical Thinking Skills: Examples

 Analysis: the ability to collect and process information and knowledge.

 Interpretation: concluding what the meaning of processed information
is.
 Inference: assessing whether the knowledge you have is sufficient and
reliable.
 Evaluation: the ability to make decisions based on the available
information.
 Explanation: communicating your findings and reasoning clearly.
 Self-Regulation: the drive to constantly monitor and correct your ways of
thinking.

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 Open-Mindedness: taking into account other possibilities and points of

view.
 Problem-Solving: the ability to tackle unexpected problems and resolve
conflicts.

In essence, critical thinking requires you to use your ability to reason. It is about
being an active learner rather than a passive recipient of information.

Critical thinkers rigorously question ideas and assumptions rather than

accepting them at face value. They will always seek to determine whether the
ideas, arguments and findings represent the entire picture and are open to
finding that they do not.

Critical thinkers will identify, analyse and solve problems systematically rather
than by intuition or instinct.

 Someone with critical thinking skills can:

 Understand the links between ideas.
 Determine the importance and relevance of arguments and ideas.
 Recognise, build and appraise arguments.
 Identify inconsistencies and errors in reasoning.
 Approach problems in a consistent and systematic way.
 Reflect on the justification of their own assumptions, beliefs and values.

Try this simple exercise to help you to start thinking critically.

Think of something that someone has recently told you. Then ask yourself the
following questions:

 Who said it?

 Someone you know? Someone in a position of authority or power? Does it
matter who told you this?
 What did they say?
 Did they give facts or opinions? Did they provide all the facts? Did they
leave anything out?
 Where did they say it?
 Was it in public or in private? Did other people have a chance to respond
an provide an alternative account?

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 When did they say it?

 Was it before, during or after an important event? Is timing important?
 Why did they say it?
 Did they explain the reasoning behind their opinion? Were they trying to
make someone look good or bad?
 How did they say it?
 Were they happy or sad, angry or indifferent? Did they write it or say it?
Could you understand what was said?

Even if you want to be a better critical thinker, it’s hard to improve upon something
you can’t define. Critical thinking is the analysis of an issue or situation and the
facts, data or evidence related to it. Ideally, critical thinking is to be done
objectively—meaning without influence from personal feelings, opinions or
biases—and it focuses solely on factual information.

Critical thinking is a skill that allows you to make logical and informed decisions to
the best of your ability. For example, a child who has not yet developed such skills
might believe the Tooth Fairy left money under their pillow based on stories their
parents told them. A critical thinker, however, can quickly conclude that the
existence of such a thing is probably unlikely—even if there are a few bucks under
their pillow.

6 Crucial critical thinking skills (and how you can improve them)

While there’s no universal standard for what skills are included in the critical
thinking process, we’ve boiled it down to the following six. Focusing on these can
put you on the path to becoming an exceptional critical thinker.

1. Identification

The first step in the critical thinking process is to identify the situation or problem
as well as the factors that may influence it. Once you have a clear picture of the
situation and the people, groups or factors that may be influenced, you can then
begin to dive deeper into an issue and its potential solutions.

How to improve: When facing any new situation, question or scenario, stop to
take a mental inventory of the state of affairs and ask the following questions:

 Who is doing what?

 What seems to be the reason for this happening?
 What are the end results, and how could they change?

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2. Research

When comparing arguments about an issue, independent research ability is key.

Arguments are meant to be persuasive—that means the facts and figures
presented in their favor might be lacking in context or come from questionable
sources. The best way to combat this is independent verification; find the source
of the information and evaluate.

How to improve: It can be helpful to develop an eye for unsourced claims. Does
the person posing the argument offer where they got this information from? If
you ask or try to find it yourself and there’s no clear answer, that should be
considered a red flag. It’s also important to know that not all sources are equally
valid—take the time to learn the difference between popular and scholarly
articles.

3. Identifying biases

This skill can be exceedingly difficult, as even the smartest among us can fail to
recognize biases. Strong critical thinkers do their best to evaluate information
objectively. Think of yourself as a judge in that you want to evaluate the claims of
both sides of an argument, but you’ll also need to keep in mind the biases each
side may possess.

It is equally important—and arguably more difficult—to learn how to set aside

your own personal biases that may cloud your judgement. “Have the courage to
debate and argue with your own thoughts and assumptions,” Potrafka
encourages. “This is essential for learning to see things from different viewpoints.”

How to improve: “Challenge yourself to identify the evidence that forms your
beliefs, and assess whether or not your sources are credible,” offers Ruth Wilson,
director of development at Brightmont Academy.

First and foremost, you must be aware that bias exists. When evaluating
information or an argument, ask yourself the following:

 Who does this benefit?

 Does the source of this information appear to have an agenda?
 Is the source overlooking, ignoring or leaving out information that doesn’t
support its beliefs or claims?
 Is this source using unnecessary language to sway an audience’s perception
of a fact?

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4. Inference

The ability to infer and draw conclusions based on the information presented to
you is another important skill for mastering critical thinking. Information doesn’t
always come with a summary that spells out what it means. You’ll often need to
assess the information given and draw conclusions based upon raw data.

The ability to infer allows you to extrapolate and discover potential outcomes
when assessing a scenario. It is also important to note that not all inferences will
be correct. For example, if you read that someone weighs 260 pounds, you might
infer they are overweight or unhealthy. Other data points like height and body
composition, however, may alter that conclusion.

How to improve: An inference is an educated guess, and your ability to infer

correctly can be polished by making a conscious effort to gather as much
information as possible before jumping to conclusions. When faced with a new
scenario or situation to evaluate, first try skimming for clues—things like
headlines, images and prominently featured statistics—and then make a point to
ask yourself what you think is going on.

5. Determining relevance

One of the most challenging parts of thinking critically during a challenging

scenario is figuring out what information is the most important for your
consideration. In many scenarios, you’ll be presented with information that may
seem important, but it may pan out to be only a minor data point to consider.

How to improve: The best way to get better at determining relevance is by

establishing a clear direction in what you’re trying to figure out. Are you tasked
with finding a solution? Should you be identifying a trend? If you figure out your
end goal, you can use this to inform your judgement of what is relevant.

Even with a clear objective, however, it can still be difficult to determine what
information is truly relevant. One strategy for combating this is to make a physical
list of data points ranked in order of relevance. When you parse it out this way,
you’ll likely end up with a list that includes a couple of obviously relevant pieces of
information at the top of your list, in addition to some points at the bottom that
you can likely disregard. From there, you can narrow your focus on the less clear-
cut topics that reside in the middle of your list for further evaluation.

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6. Curiosity

It’s incredibly easy to sit back and take everything presented to you at face value,
but that can also be also a recipe for disaster when faced with a scenario that
requires critical thinking. It’s true that we’re all naturally curious—just ask any
parent who has faced an onslaught of “Why?” questions from their child. As we
get older, it can be easier to get in the habit of keeping that impulse to ask
questions at bay. But that’s not a winning approach for critical thinking.

How to improve: While it might seem like a curious mind is just something you’re
born with, you can still train yourself to foster that curiosity productively. All it
takes is a conscious effort to ask open-ended questions about the things you see
in your everyday life, and you can then invest the time to follow up on these
questions.

“Being able to ask open-ended questions is an important skill to develop—and

bonus points for being able to probe,” Potrafka says.

How to think effectively: Six stages of critical thinking

Stage One: The Unreflective Thinker

These are people who don't reflect about thinking and the effect it has on their
lives. As such, they form opinions and make decisions based on prejudices and
misconceptions while their thinking doesn't improve.

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Unreflective thinkers lack crucial skills that would allow them to parse their
thought processes. They also do not apply standards like accuracy, relevance,
precision, and logic in a consistent fashion.

Stage Two: The Challenged Thinker

This next level up thinker has awareness of the importance of thinking on their
existence and knows that deficiencies in thinking can bring about major issues.
As the psychologists explain, to solve a problem, you must first admit you have
one.

People at this intellectual stage begin to understand that "high quality thinking
requires deliberate reflective thinking about thinking", and can acknowledge that
their own mental processes might have many flaws. They might not be able to
identify all the flaws, however.

A challenged thinker may have a sense that solid thinking involves navigating
assumptions, inferences, and points of view, but only on an initial level. They
may also be able to spot some instances of their own self-deception. The true
difficulty for thinkers of this category is in not "believing that their thinking is
better than it actually is, making it more difficult to recognize the problems
inherent in poor thinking," explain the researchers.

Stage Three: The Beginning Thinker

Thinkers at this level can go beyond the nascent intellectual humility and actively
look to take control of their thinking across areas of their lives. They know that
their own thinking can have blind spots and other problems and take steps to
address those, but in a limited capacity.

Beginning thinkers place more value in reason, becoming self-aware in their

thoughts. They may also be able to start looking at the concepts and biases
underlying their ideas. Additionally, such thinkers develop higher internal
standards of clarity, accuracy and logic, realizing that their ego plays a key role in
their decisions.

Another big aspect that differentiates this stronger thinker – some ability to take
criticism of their mental approach, even though they still have work to do and
might lack clear enough solutions to the issues they spot.

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Stage Four: The Practicing Thinker

This more experienced kind of thinker not only appreciates their own
deficiencies, but has skills to deal with them. A thinker of this level will practice
better thinking habits and will analyze their mental processes with regularity.

While they might be able to express their mind's strengths and weaknesses, as a
negative, practicing thinkers might still not have a systematic way of gaining
insight into their thoughts and can fall prey to egocentric and self-deceptive
reasoning.

How do you get to this stage? An important trait to gain, say the psychologists,
is "intellectual perseverance." This quality can provide "the impetus for
developing a realistic plan for systematic practice (with a view to taking greater
command of one's thinking)."

"We must teach in such a way that students come to understand the
power in knowing that whenever humans reason, they have no choice but
to use certain predictable structures of thought: that thinking is inevitably
driven by the questions, that we seek answers to questions for some
purpose, that to answer questions, we need information, that to use
information we must interpret it (i.e., by making inferences), and that our
inferences, in turn, are based on assumptions, and have implications, all of
which involves ideas or concepts within some point of view," explain Elder
and Paul.

Stage Five: The Advanced Thinker

One doesn't typically get to this stage until college and beyond, estimate the
scientists. This higher-level thinker would have strong habits that would allow
them to analyze their thinking with insight about different areas of life. They
would be fair-minded and able to spot the prejudicial aspects in the points of
view of others and their own understanding.

While they'd have a good handle on the role of their ego in the idea flow, such
thinkers might still not be able to grasp all the influences that affect their
mentality.

The advanced thinker is at ease with self-critique and does so systematically,

looking to improve. Among key traits required for this level are "intellectual
insight" to develop new thought habits, "intellectual integrity" to "recognize
areas of inconsistency and contradiction in one's life," intellectual empathy" to
put oneself in the place of others in order to genuinely understand them, and

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the "intellectual courage" to confront ideas and beliefs they don't necessarily
believe in and have negative emotions towards.

Stage Six: The Master Thinker

This is the super-thinker, the one who is totally in control of how they process
information and make decisions. Such people constantly seek to improve their
thought skills, and through experience "regularly raise their thinking to the level
of conscious realization."

A master thinker achieves great insights into deep mental levels, strongly
committed to being fair and gaining control over their own egocentrism.

Such a high-level thinker also exhibits superior practical knowledge and insight,
always re-examining their assumptions for weaknesses, logic, and biases.

And, of course, a master thinker wouldn't get upset with being intellectually
confronted and spends a considerable amount of time analyzing their own
responses.

"Why is this so important? Precisely because the human mind, left to its
own, pursues that which is immediately easy, that which is comfortable,
and that which serves its selfish interests. At the same time, it naturally
resists that which is difficult to understand, that which involves
complexity, that which requires entering the thinking and predicaments of
others," write the researchers.

So how do you become a master thinker? The psychologists think most students
will never get there. But a lifetime of practicing the best intellectual traits can get
you to that point when "people of good sense seek out master thinkers, for they
recognize and value the ability of master thinkers to think through complex
issues with judgment and insight."

The significance of critical thinking in our daily lives, especially in these confusing
times, so rife with quick and often-misleading information, cannot be overstated.
The decisions we make today can truly be life and death.

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References

 https://www.skillsyouneed.com/learn/critical-thinking.html
 https://www.rasmussen.edu/student-experience/college-life/critical-
thinking-skills-to-master-now/
 https://zety.com/blog/critical-thinking-skills
 https://bigthink.com/personal-growth/how-to-think-effectively-6-stages-
of-critical-thinking

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