"Critical thinking includes motivational dispositions, such as inquisitiveness, open-mindedness, tolerance for ambiguity, thinking about thinking, honesty in assessing or evaluating biases, and willingness to reconsider one's own views and ways of doing things. This last part is crucial to our critical thinking capacity, and is represented in a negatively worded item of the Critical Thinking Dispositions Scale: 'Changing one's mind is a sign of weakness.'"
"But being wrong is not a character flaw or something horrible from which one can never recover. It need not be a source of embarrassment. It's insisting on remaining wrong about something that becomes dicey. Many folks are afraid to face the truth and are unwilling to change their minds for fear it indicates a personal failing."
"In addition to checking our own biases and updating our personal views, critical thinking helps us sustain the complexity of a phenomenon or problem and to avoid oversimplifying reality. Sure, when a political leader promises a simple fix to a complex problem, it can sound appealing, because of the reductionistic notion that an overly simplified problem."
Critical thinking encompasses motivational dispositions including inquisitiveness, open-mindedness, tolerance for ambiguity, and willingness to reconsider one's views. Many people resist changing their minds due to fear that doing so indicates personal weakness or failure. However, being wrong is not a character flaw or irreversible source of shame. The real problem emerges when people insist on remaining wrong, often because they fear cognitive dissonance from confronting new information or facts about their biases, political beliefs, or other convictions. Some individuals deny the existence of facts and truth entirely to avoid this discomfort. Beyond personal bias assessment, critical thinking helps sustain complexity and prevents oversimplification of problems, countering appeals of overly simplistic solutions.
Read at Psychology Today
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