Critical thinking and society exercise

1. Describe a situation in which critical and creative thought could have been used for a better outcome. Describe why it is important to think critically and creatively in similar situations. Stepping into the previous position, prior to becoming the team lead, I was given a specific role and told that all materials had been developed by the previous group. Being new we should just follow the examples that previous employees had developed for us and continue to develop that material.

The fact that the previous employees were no longer on the project should have been the first clue that we needed to look closely at the materials we were using, it could have saved us a lot of growing pains. First time we presented the materials the customer (US Marines), stated “ the materials we were using were old and inaccurate”. If any of us on the team would have taken the time to critically look at the information that we had to present and the defined requirements.

We would have known that the information we were presenting was not what was asked for and saved a lot of growing pains. Catching the correct requirements and presenting those would have given better credibility to the team as a whole and required less work in the long run.

2. Define free will, truth, knowledge, and opinion. Explain how we use them to form thoughts. Free will is based upon decisions we make in collaboration with conditioning within the society we live in. Individuals may think they are exercising free will when in fact they are carrying out exercises in pre-conditioning. Truth is a best guess of what we know to be the likely outcome at the time. New information received overtime may further shape what is believed to be a truth.

Knowledge is a combination of knowing and reality, people gain knowledge through several methods of personal experience, through others and through observation. It is not enough to know without there being substance or reality behind it to define it as knowledge. Opinions are ones general belief based upon likes or dislikes and judgments. Using the above thought process we can see how individuals come to many conclusions without precise information that defines a problem. A person will often rely on information that has been previously thought of as common knowledge only to find out that reality is much different than perception.

Truth as well may change overtime to become a new baseline of thought and then when we are trying to use our free will to develop a conclusion we find out that we have been preconditioned for an expected response.

3. Identify three hindrances to the critical thinking process. Determine methods for overcoming these hindrances. Identify a time in which you experienced a hindrance in critical thinking. Describe a method you could use to overcome the hindrances. The three hindrances to critical thinking I find the most common are conformity, stereotyping and self-deception. I find it extremely prevalent in my teenage children and it is something very difficult to overcome.

Conformity, I think personally is the most difficult for most individuals to overcome because you must learn to think for yourself and not care how many others agree with you. Teaching the correct conformity can be even more difficult as you don’t want someone to swing so far on the pendulum that they no longer connect with their environment. Stereotyping, doesn’t just create and prejudices against individuals but also against ideals based upon likes, dislikes, fears and other judgments that in most cases are irrational. Stereotyping is often overcome by defining the truth behind the stereotype.

Self-deception, I best describe as the spoiled teenager. I still have problems every week overcoming this perception with my own children. It is never my fault mentality; the best way to work through this is to walk the individual through the thought process to understand where they could have made things better. I cannot go into great detail on the experience but while I was deployed I kept running into information about an individual that I was looking at while deployed overseas that kept connecting him to drugs.

Most of the information I would skip over because he was known as being extremely religious. Having the western mentality on religion stopped me and my co-workers from correctly identifying this because of his religious background and properly processing the information. By throwing out that preconception and looking at it from another angle we were able to capture the individual during a drug transfer.

4. Identify a message in advertising. Describe how you perceive the message of the advertisement. Try to determine the reality of the advertisement. Distinguish between your perception and the reality of the message. Geico’s message of “ 15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance” is the first message that comes to mind for advertising. Geico’s message has been so continuous that as the new commercials display it has become thought of as a fact.

The new commercials themselves show individuals trying to one up the other because they have just been made aware of what everyone else sees as fact. Determining the reality of the advertisement is a little more difficult without doing a survey of different individuals with different circumstances testing the source. I would say in some cases this may be true but certainly not in most cases. The perception the advertisement gives if you didn’t know this as fact then you’re not living in reality. The reality of the message is that if you call you may be able to save UP TO 15 percent on your insurance. It is not a fact that you will only that you could.