Essential Skills for Effective Critical Thinking

I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with me by exploring topics that span leadership, business management, education, and other musings designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement. Today is November 16, 2024.

Last week, I spoke about the need for building critical thinking skills in our population. As I’ll discuss at the end of today’s Muse, critical thinking skills are in short supply as evidenced by the deep well of conspiracy theories that are making their way from the dark fringes of society into the mainstream. For truth, fact, and rational thought to prevail, we must work diligently to enhance critical thinking skills in our economy—no one should be left behind in this effort.

The challenge we face is that critical thinking is hard. The easy path is to not question, not ask ‘why,’ and not dig for deeper meaning and root cause. The more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding path is to challenge fixed belief systems, internal biases, and recognize that when we deflect and point fingers at others, three more are pointing right back at us.

History is littered with examples of the horrors that accompany social structures where a population yields its responsibility to question and think rationally to dictators, strongmen, and cults of personality. In these environments, democratic ideals are shunned in the name of expediency, efficiency, and unity around a specific subgroup of the population. In these environments, everyone—with the exception of an elite inner circle—suffers and the population subgroups that are deemed out-of-favor are demonized, persecuted, and are, in some cases, thought of as sub-human—worthy of extinction or termination. Yes, the subgroup that’s in favor may experience enhanced freedoms, but everyone else’s freedom is suppressed and suffers.

Dictators and strongmen thrive when a populace is undereducated and present with minds that are easily manipulated and moulded with rhetoric and bluster. Education, critical thinking, and strong decision-making represent bulwarks that stand in defense of bullies that seek power for their own benefit. Extreme rhetoric, lies, and over-simplistic narratives melt in the face of an educated citizenry armed with strong critical thinking and decision-making skills.

So what makes critical thinking so difficult? Critical thinking is a higher order skill that relies upon a host of well-developed sub-skills. Last week, we introduced active listening as one of the most important sub-skills to support strong critical thinking. However, this is just one of many such skills that support strong critical thinking. To build the stack of other sub-skills that are necessary for critical thinking, I’d like to take you back to last week’s Muse and Linda Elder’s definition of critical thinking that can be found on The Foundation of Critical Thinking’s website. Here’s a condensation of her work:

Critical thinking is self-guided, self-disciplined thinking which attempts to reason at the highest level of quality in a fair-minded way. People who think critically consistently attempt to live rationally, reasonably, empathically. … … They realize that no matter how skilled they are as thinkers, they can always improve their reasoning abilities and they will at times fall prey to mistakes in reasoning, human irrationality, prejudices, biases, distortions, … …, self-interest, and vested interest. … … They recognize the complexities in developing as thinkers, and commit themselves to a life-long practice toward self-improvement. … …

~ Linda Elder, September, 2007

Hence, the stack of sub-skills that support strong critical thinking—in addition to active listening—are as follows:

• Courage

• Creativity

• Curiosity

• Compassion

• Logic/Reason

• Self Awareness

• Situational Awareness

• Self Discipline

I’m certain that this list can be expanded upon further evaluation, but these are, in my opinion, the necessary conditions for effective critical thinking. Armed with this list, it should now be fairly obvious that there is a specific hierarchy to the development of critical thinking skills.

Education leads to better critical thinking, which leads to better decision-making.

So now we’ve illustrated two benefits to enhancing critical thinking skills in our society. (1) Critical thinking is necessary to support the great American experiment in democracy, and (2) critical thinking supports good decision-making. From last week’s Muse:

Since (a) an individual’s life experience is defined by the decisions they make over time, and (b) critical thinking is a necessary condition for making better decisions; if an individual wants to (c) live a rich, meaningful life and achieve economic and professional success, then (d) it is essential to build critical thinking skills so they can make more good decisions than bad.

To conclude, today’s Muse, I’d like to apply our newfound critical thinking skills to the narrative that elections are rigged in the United States. Since the Republican Party swept the White House, Senate, and House, talk of rigged elections has declined significantly. However, in my home State of Wisconsin, the losing Senate contender—who is a Republican—is claiming election interference and irregularities. The question we should all be asking is this: “why are elections only rigged when your party loses?” To be fair, the Democratic Party has also been guilty of crying foul and claiming election interference, but not nearly at the scale that we’ve seen since the rise of the Tea Party and Trumpism.

So do we have free and fair elections? Is there some dark cabal of political operatives with the skill, tools, and motivation to alter the will of the people? While there have been such instances deeper in our past, the elections of today are run by a rigid set of rules that have been honed over decades and are overseen and implemented by your fellow citizens and in many cases your neighbors. To my critical eye, it’s insulting to hear old tropes trotted out about the security of our elections. Is a migrant who risked life and limb to come to this country and is here illegally really going to show up at a polling place to put all they’ve risked on the line to cast a vote? Are the retired volunteers at your local polling place really in cahoots with some underworld political faction to sway an election result? Incessant questions of election integrity are a slap in the face to the individuals who work diligently to ensure your vote counts and that our elections are indeed free and fair. Yes, we should ask well-constructed, critical questions to ensure that guardrails are sound, but when the constructive discourse and litigation is over, we must accept the outcomes of our elections. To do otherwise is undemocratic.

Critical thinking matters. Pass it on.

Grace. Dignity. Compassion.