Barriers and Obstacles To Critical Thinking: The Individual/Psychology and The Group/Sociology
-these are natural, but provide unreliable standards for judgment, or the bypassing of judgment overall. While being individuals with private perspectives, thoughts, emotions, desires, motivations and self-interests is normal for us, many barriers to critical thinking come from this aspect of human nature. Likewise, while we are innately social beings who require coexistence with others for development and success, we can be prevented from thinking critically by this aspect of ourselves. All of the points below are potential barriers to critical thinking. In order to think critically, one must, initially, make sure that none of these barriers are in effect.
1.) egocentrism: Using one’s own perspective as authoritative or one’s own self-interests as standards for no other reason than that they are one’s own perspective or interests. One is being egocentric when they fail to view reality or evaluate beliefs from a vantage point other than the one they come most naturally with. This is tragic in the sense that this person will be unable to see reality as anything other than what their limited view or motivations make of it, which is not even helpful for for the pursuit of their own self-interests.
2.) self-serving biases: We tend to overestimate our own strengths and merits while ignoring our weaknesses and faults; it is easy to think that we are above average for no other reason than that we are us; others tend to be blamed for our failures, and we tend to take all the credit for our successes. This is a kind of double-standard we apply to ourselves. It prevents us from seeing things as they are, because we distort our vision with our own self-delusions.
3.) Subjectivism: We are committing a subjectivist fallacy when we think that, just because we believe something is true, it is true for no other reason that that we believe it. It is easy for us to be deluded into thinking that our our beliefs are true just because they are ours, but this is obviously misleading. A further problem arises in that our brains release dopamine which makes us feel happy when we think we are right. If I say, ”you’re right,” you are likely to receive happiness from this. In this way there is a physiological incentive for us to think we are right, whether we are right or not.
4.) Confirmation bias: One commits confirmation bias when they attempt to prove that a belief they hold is correct by finding evidence in favor of it. This sounds like proper investigation, but is flawed. If one only attempts to find evidence which confirms their beliefs, all that they will accomplish is the confirmation of their beliefs. One must also look for disconfirming evidence, or evidence that would contradict their belief. There is enough evidence in the world to confirm any belief at all. The trick is to figure out which beliefs have the most, the best, evidence in favor of them. In order to do this, we have to try to both confirm and disconfirm beliefs at the same
Prof. Eckel, U. Toledo, FA17
time. There may be a tiny fragment of confirming evidence for my belief. If that’s all I look for, I could be ignoring a mountain of evidence that disconfirms my belief.
5.) Selective attention: When a particular belief of ours limits our ability to fairly analyze all the relevant information, we are selectively tuning out certain information. This is a form of narrow-mindedness that should be avoided because it leads us to lack access to the facts we need to make good decisions. One is being selectively attentive when a prior belief makes it so that certain later beliefs are impossible to hold or even evaluate since certain information which would lead to that later belief is simply ignored.
6.) Avoidance: When we intentionally block out certain sources of information because they do not conform to our pre-existing beliefs. This is a way of sidestepping the hard work of evaluating the support for beliefs by simply not paying attention to other beliefs so that ours look like the strongest supported ones. We are essentially making sure that our beliefs are the only game in town as far as we’re concerned.
7.) Anger: We become angry when our beliefs are challenged so we react toward whatever challenged them in a hostile way. The impulse is that if we can destroy or force a retreat from the source of conflict, then our beliefs will somehow be more true. This is irrational. Anger is an emotion, and it is incapable of discerning true from false beliefs because it is a response, not a way to evaluate. By forcefully ejecting the source of opposition, it simply becomes easier to seem correct. Anger is an understandable response, but we should not feel attacked when our beliefs are challenged. We should want to see if the challenge is legitimate. I identify with my beliefs, but I am not well served if I identify with false beliefs.
8.) Cliche: A cliche is a platitude that may be used to deflect, disarm, or simply end the evaluation of beliefs. ”To each their own,” ”Everyone is entitled to their own opinion,” or ”That’s true for you but not for me,” are simply ways to end an otherwise legitimate search for true beliefs because we don’t want to be proven wrong or hurt someone else. When a cliche is employed, it is against critical thinking. Be cautious of tactical uses of cliche. I may be inclined to use a cliche to end a debate when I know that I’m about to lose. Don’t let me off the hook so easily.
9.) Denial: We commit to denialism when we simply refuse to connect evidence and support to the beliefs which they support. I am in denial I simply refuse to think, act, or behave in accordance with what is known. This is generally done because one would rather hold the belief, because it matters that much to them for some reason, rather than have a true belief, when one thinks that beliefs are supposed to do something other than be true (like make us happy, make us feel good, give us power, etc.).
Prof. Eckel, U. Toledo, FA17
10.) Ignorance: We are prevented from thinking critically if we are ignorant of relevant information we need in order to evaluate a belief. This can occur deliberately or accidentally. I can choose to be ignorant of information so that I’m not guilty of blunt denial, if holding my belief matters that much to me. I may willfully refuse to understand a topic because I am afraid to uncover information which would force me to either change my cherished beliefs or bluntly commit to denial.
11.) Struggle: I may choose to struggle as a way a deferring my understanding of a topic instead of allowing that understanding to force me to revise my beliefs. If evidence leads me to believe that my most cherished belief is false, I may choose to simply turn the struggle against that evidence into my focus rather than focus on my belief. I may simply bury myself in information until I’m lost and choose to stay lost so that I don’t have to proportion my belief to evidence. I would be constantly working on understanding but refusing to acknowledge what I need to do with that understanding. At a certain point, conclusions can be drawn. If I let the fact that we don’t have absolute knowledge about the issue prevent me from drawing a conclusion I don’t like, then I’m choosing to struggle. Humans do not have absolute knowledge about anything; inquiries are always ongoing, but we have more or less evidence on certain cases so should have more or less confidence in the beliefs which that evidence supports. Letting the imperfections of human knowledge keep us from accepting a belief we don’t like is a cop-out.
12.) Distraction: When I defer coming to a conclusion I don’t like by filling my mind with irrelevant matters and tasks, I’m simply distracting myself in a tactical way to preserve the lifespan of the belief I’m worried will have to be revised. There will always be something to distract ourselves with, and others may also keep us in the dark by distracting us. Keeping priorities regarding truth intact regardless of where that pursuit leads is critical thinking. Anything else is running away.
13.) Rationalization: We rationalize whenever we come up with a justification for a belief or act after we have already decided to hold the belief or do the act. This is the reverse order of only accepting a belief when we have a good reason to. If one has a belief, then needs to justify it later, then they definitionally don’t have a good reason to have that belief in the first place. Making a justification up later is simply writing a story to make the belief seem more acceptable after it has already been accepted. One essentially cherry-picks a belief then concocts a story to makes it seem more acceptable to themselves and others. This will never yield a true belief in any other way than by accident.
14.) Double-Think/Double-Standard: One is guilty of double-think when they hold two contradictory views as true. The definition of a contradiction is when two beliefs both cannot be true at the same time. Thus, at least one of the beliefs is a false belief. It is easy to do this, since our worldviews are collections of a great many beliefs which we generally pick up in a
Prof. Eckel, U. Toledo, FA17
scattershot way. We also tend to use our belief pragmatically: as long as they work they are good beliefs. Thus it becomes possible for me to do something like believe that there should be a separation of church and state, then vote for a candidate whose agenda represents that candidate’s religious beliefs which represent mine. This could be ignorance of the contradiction on my part, or I may understand that contradiction but not care because I gain from it. In one context, it makes sense to believe one of those beliefs. In another context, the other seems fine. Taken as a whole, they contradict. The deeper concern would be if we doublethink in a self-serving way, that is, we flip-flop our principles if it is advantageous for us personally. If an opposing candidate has religious views that don’t conform to mine, I may play my separation of church and state card. When a candidate comes along whose views do support mine, I may play my vote for the personal who will best represent my political interests card. This is simply abandoning a commitment to true beliefs so that one can use them as weapons.
15.) Stereotypes: A stereotype is an overgeneralization about a group, normally of people. We’ll look at overgeneralization more, but understand it this way: I overgeneralize when I conclude something about a group based on evidence from an insufficient number of members of that group. We extend past what the evidence can account for. We have to make generalizations to live. If I wait to pay for my groceries because I haven’t determined whether every cashier in the world is reliable so I don’t know about the one in front of me, I’m being ridiculous. At a certain point, we must decide. Then again, we are too easily lazy with our generalizations and able to cherry-pick, since it’s an imperfect way of understanding. Stereotypes are employed against people as a way of gaining some kind of power over them. It is easy to remove someone’s power or worth by placing them in an incredibly broad category, asserting some common feature of that category which would justify the treatment, then assuming that the person is one of the members of the group with that feature. Overall, stereotypes are way of making cheap determinations on insufficient evidence.
16.) Fear of Challenge: Many barrier come from a fear of revising cherished beliefs, undermining oneself, or having to do the hard work of determining what is true or good. Critical thinking is hard, tedious, and uncomfortable. The urge to take the path of least resistance is strong. Overall, if we don’t challenge ourselves, we simply will not grow, personally, or as a society. We’ll simply stop at a certain point, saying things are good enough. This is a kind of laziness and avoidance which essentially ends the human project of advancement in every way. We are never finished, never perfect, but can always get better. The only thing that is good enough is realizing this and trying to get better.
17.) Misperception of random data: Humans impose meanings on otherwise meaningless information. The human mind is a meaning-producing machine. From all of the sensory data that pours in, the mind organizes it according to certain concepts, rules, and beliefs. In the absence of order, we make order, no matter what. This is why in ambiguous phenomena like smoke, clouds,
Prof. Eckel, U. Toledo, FA17
crumbly walls, or cheese-puffs we see things that aren’t there. The lesson for critical thinking: don’t assume that the world is the way it seems at first glance. Make sure you’re not putting meaning where it doesn’t actually belong. If you believe something, make sure that there’s more going on than just you making it believable.
18.) Memorable events error: The human mind recalls events primordially based on the criteria of strongest emotive impact. We recall evidence from memory based on things like fear, love, trauma, bliss, then we use that recollection as a standard. This runs the risk of giving us a bad belief to use for evaluation which then causes selective attention. If I need to determine whether or not I should eat a salad, then only recall that salad which made me sick ten years ago, then refuse to eat salad now because it might make me sick, I’m simply misrepresenting the probabilities because I’m letting my emotions give one factor a power it doesn’t have.
19.) Innumeracy: Humans are traditionally bad at determining probabilities and statistics, even doing simple math, in an experiential way. We often commit the gambler’s fallacy: thinking that our actions determine the outcomes of random events (pay attention to the meaning of the word random). We also tend to mythologize events, making probabilities seem improbable. For example, we often think of what a coincidence it is when something happens which we were just thinking about. In fact, we are retroactively going back in time, picking that thought out of the thousands of thoughts we had in the previous hour, and assigning it a value it doesn’t have based on the fact that it corresponds to an event we just experienced. Think of your friend calling you after you thought of them. You likely think of friends every minute in an unconscious, quick, associative way without noting it. When the friend calls, you retrieve the thought and assign it a kind of magic improbability. When we say, ”What are the chances of that?” They’re often quite good. Don’t assign a mystical value to these situations. The true improbability is that your thought of the friend somehow caused them to call, far more improbable than the coincidence you made too much of. The problem is that, if we add small situations like this together, it becomes too easy to think the world allows for some kind of magic in general.
20.) Self-fulfilling prophecy: When a belief causes it’s own confirmation, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I believe that I am unlikable, so become anti-social, I will have fewer people who like me, thus confirming my initial belief by causing the evidence to come into existence for it when this evidence wouldn’t have otherwise been there. Make sure that beliefs don’t produce their own evidence. This is a kind of accidental confirmation bias which is quite dangerous. If I believe that all Muslims are terrorists, then go about destroying and alienating as many Muslims as I can, I’m quite easily making more Islamic terrorists which only confirms my initial belief more and more. To avoid this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, one must always ask why until they reach the origin. If I don’t look back far enough, I may just see that I’m friendless and
Prof. Eckel, U. Toledo, FA17
therefore unlikable, or that Islamic terrorists are more prevalent and hence Muslims must be terrorists.
21.) Absolutism: see the previous lecture notes on this topic. Also consider relativism a barrier.
22.) Conformism: When one simply accepts the values, beliefs, and practices of their social group without any additional evidence in favor of the legitimacy of those values, beliefs, or practices, they are simply conforming to their group without thinking critically. We do this when we are young because we have few other options; we simply are socialized into whatever random society we happen to be born into. Maturity, however, brings the option of revising that initial random selection by questioning your socialization. Experience with diverse groups is crucial here, since the tools to fight conformity come from outside the initial group. Only by maximal experience with diversity can we be sure that we are not only avoiding conformity, but picking the best beliefs for the best reasons from synthesis and comparison.
23.) Ethnocentrism/group-think: This is the same problem as egocentrism, but with a broader circle. Instead of only seeing things from the perspective of one’s own subjective view, with ethnocentrism or group-think, one only sees things from the perspective of whatever social group they happen to be in. The limitations are exactly the same, however. In fact, the risk is worse. As an egocentrist, the world will consistently disconfirm that you are, in fact, its center. As an ethnocentric person, on the other hand, the world will disconfirm that your group is, in fact, the center of it all, but it’s far easier to ignore or rationalize this disconfirmation. An egocentric person may be able to push their narcissism to nearly psychotic proportions, but not often. A person who completely conforms to their socialization, however, by definition has a bunch of other people to use for confirmation. For an egocentric person, they have to start blaming their failures to understand and act effectively on everyone and everything else. For an ethnocentric person, they still start blaming everything external for their failures, but they are able to see others like them and use that as confirmation that they aren’t crazy. The problem is that they simply might be in a group of irrational people who use the fact that there are others like them as confirmation that they are behaving or thinking rationally. If they are properly ethnocentric and committed to groupthink, full conformity, they’ll have no other perspective to judge by than their group’s standards, so even their definition of ’rationality’ will be determined by their irrational group. This is why diversity is the only antidote to fanaticism. At the very least, we should be concerned with using group-beliefs as a lens to interpret the world through. While this is unavoidable, not all beliefs track reality in equally adequate ways. Group expectations can incite mass delusions which are nearly unstoppable. A collective delusion is simply a bogus worldview shared by a group. The irrationality has officially become all-powerful at that point. The Salem Witch Trials is a good example of this. One may see the Holocaust similarly, which was based on a collective delusion that genocide would somehow be advantageous to enact or permit.
Prof. Eckel, U. Toledo, FA17
24.) One of us/them: From an extreme enough kind of groupthink, it becomes easy to see the social world as an absolute dualist: either one of us or one of them. This is easy to do for extremist groups, who have a lot of push-back from the world around them. They are able to turn that disconfirmation into confirmation by blaming that world and the others in it rather than their own irrationality for their shortcomings caused by limited perspective. This is a kind of self-serving bias at the level group-psychology in the sense that bad=them and good=us is an absurdly simplified way. The error makes sense: first the limited perspective of group-think makes it hard for the group to be effective in their endeavors because they don’t understand the world efficiently; then the group can rationalize this frustration by externalizing it onto another group since they seem rational enough to themselves and have no external standard to check with; finally, this act of turning another group into an evil group makes sense to the initial group, since they don’t actually understand that group they’ve just overgeneralized anyway due to their initial lack of perspective which caused the whole mess in the first place. A significant danger comes from groups whose identity is either threatened or loose to begin with. If a group’s identity needs defining, strengthening, or clarifying, it is cheap and easy to construct the revised identity as a negative definition: we are not them. Groups that lack substance make this move easily. Those who wish to construct a certain group will use this to their advantage. This often takes a moral connotation. They are bad; we are not them, so we are good. Nothing gets a group cohesive like predicating its own identity on an enemy when that identity is otherwise illegitimate, broken, or impotent. Those who seek control over groups know this, and are able to construct obedience by constructing enemies to fear, then mobilize the obedient followers with hate. This is the road to political authoritarianism. You should be able to see it interpersonally as well. When two friends are talking together but have very little to talk about, the conversation can be easily propped up and the bond deepened by listing off all of the ways that they dislike a third, non-present friend. In this way, groupthink creates myths that serve the group which often take on dualistic dangers with real consequences.
25.) Peer-pressure: Peer-pressure is a way for social groups to maintain themselves by ensuring conformity though coercion. All social groups are made of individuals who are members of that group in virtue of sharing some kind of beliefs, values, or practices with the rest of the members of that group. When a member deviates from the group identity by not sharing the appropriate beliefs, values, or practices which define that group, the group self-corrects by (1) making sure the deviation is made explicit and (2) punishing the deviation. In this way, groups stay alive by reproducing their rules (“We believe, value, do this….”) as though they were replicating DNA. Peer-pressure is that auto-correct. It may be laughter; it may be killing someone; it may be anything in between. People succumb to peer-pressure then conform because there is an incentive to. They may be punished, humiliated, harmed, or they could simply have the benefits of being a member of that group revoked. This could include anything from security, money, or a future, to the love of friends and family. None of this has anything to do with true beliefs in the
Prof. Eckel, U. Toledo, FA17
slightest. It works the same for any belief. This is why we must examine our socialization. We may be coerced into propagating a falsehood because we didn’t like the consequences.
26.) Face-saving: We save face whenever we believe, claim, or do something simply because we want to affirm that we are the kind of person who believes, says, or does that kind of thing. This is often for some kind of reward like group-membership or personal gratification. Again, it has nothing to do with the truth. It’s a form of self-marketing.
27.) Anthropocentrism: Anthropocentrism is when we limit our view to the human perspective. It runs the same risks as egocentrism and ethnocentrism, just with a broader circle. Anthropocentrism views everything from the vantage point of humans. On the one hand, this is natural. On the other hand, the truth of things is not disclosed by their relation to humans alone. Things are not for humans. Reality both preceded and will exceed humans in time and space. Reality is not FOR human understanding or use. If we think that reality is FOR us, we will never understand it as it is. One must understand a phenomenon from a non-human perspective as much as it can be understood that way. This eliminates biases. First, this how we avoid anthropomorphizing things, turning them into people or understanding them by analogy with people. We used to understand everything this way by attributing some human-like god or spirit to it. To understand the weather, we cannot understand it as the product of the human-like desires and actions of Zeus or Poseidon, and we do better when we understand it as atmospheric variations, as what it is. To understand our cat, we’d do better to understand him as a cat, not Mr. Fluffy who is a refined gentleman. Anthropomorphizing is not a good way to gain access to true beliefs; it is an obvious projection of our own selves onto the world around us. A further danger of anthropocentrism is to believe that things are for our own use. A biologist who understood a tree only through the lens of an object to be used would be a terrible biologist. They might understand the features of a tree that make it a good bit of lumber, or producer of fruit, or bit of cover to hide from enemies behind, but they could never understand the tree for what it is in itself in all of its features. Crucially, the tree’s being does not conform to our uses of it. It has features that exceed our use of it. It is something more. We have to eliminate our human biases as much as possible in order to objectively analyze things in their non-human being.
28.) Diffusion of Responsibility: This is when people are less inclined to take responsibility due to the presence of other people. In short, the more people there are in a situation, the less likely those same individuals are to take responsibility for something compared to if those individuals were in a situation with less people, or alone. The error is in conforming to group-think unconsciously, where we for some reason ignore moral impulses under conditions which are irrelevant to the moral standing of the situation. If it is wrong in a group of 10, it is wrong in a group of 1,000 if nothing but that quantities of people change. Humans, however, aren’t wired to operate like this. Make sure you are not letting this diffusion effect your beliefs.
Prof. Eckel, U. Toledo, FA17