I recently finished Dan Ariely’s recent book, called Misbelief. According to the description, it talks about why we fall into believing in conspiracy theories. But to me, it’s a book about some elements of critical thinking to use in our daily lives. 

Interestingly, only a few days before reading it, I had a chat about why I’m constantly being asked to be an advisor in areas I don’t know that much about. What makes people think that I can add value to fields I’m not an expert in, and why do they prefer to rely on me, someone without a deep knowledge of the fields, rather than learn that stuff themselves? 

These two seemingly separate areas (conspiracy theories and me being treated as an expert when I’m not) have one thing in common – critical thinking. Or the lack of it. The thing is that I make up for the lack of knowledge by using critical thinking, asking good questions, asking for the reasons why things happen, understanding the relationship between different phenomenons, their causes and effects, and asking for any data that may allow me to see the bigger picture. Of course, I managed to accumulate some knowledge, too – one does in over 40 years of living – but what I do best is to reuse what I know in one area, adjust it and apply it to another field. 

Someone once told me that we can make up for the lack of knowledge with high IQ and it stayed with me for years. But now I think it’s not IQ – it’s critical thinking. 

Only what critical thinking is? There are resources everywhere teaching the methods. But using 5-whys or Ishikawa doesn’t make one a “critical thinker”. It’s like the ability to use a hammer doesn’t make one capable of building a house. You first need to know what to build to be able to use the tool for that very purpose. It’s the same with critical thinking tools – you need to know what state you want to achieve to be able to use them properly. This is what the critical thinking courses and books often miss. So let’s do a somewhat deeper dive into critical thinking. 

The house of thinking 

Questioning authority is my cup of tea, I know, so I appreciate that it’s easy for me but doesn’t have to be so for everyone. Yet, the moment we leave school we should be able to think for ourselves, instead of just mindlessly consuming yet another opinion, idea, or principle. 

Questioning what we are told, asking “Is that really so” or “Should it be this way”, no matter who we are listening to, is tough. It takes time and energy which we would gladly use on something else. This is why we decide not to do it. By applying other people’s rules to our lives, they become easier. At least for a while… 

The key then is to know what to question and what not, i.e. when questioning something would be a waste of time. It’s not about assuming that rules do not apply to you and that everyone around you knows nothing. That would be the opposite of the mindless acceptance of other people’s thoughts and it has nothing to do with critical thinking. And critical thinking is about verifying if the rules make greater sense. It’s about checking the quality of people’s opinions before taking them as your own. 

When I teach solicitors about linguistics and about asking good questions, one thing I mention over and over again is that we humans are by default trustful. It’s called trust bias and it helps us not to waste our time on analysing each and every thing people tell us. We need to assume things are true. Otherwise, we would spend our days proofing (or contradicting) all that we hear. It wouldn’t be the most efficient way to live. Only, it becomes a problem when we trust too much. Another fallacy to be aware of is the illusory truth effect when multiple exposures to the same information make us think it’s true. They both, as well as other truth-related biases, may skew your critical thinking abilities. 

So what is the goal of using critical thinking, what are we trying to achieve by learning and using the skill? Thinking independently is the answer. The goal is to build your own set of thoughts and beliefs rather than following other people’s wrong convictions. This is the house you want to build using the hammer. And here come the elements that make it solid. 

The bigger picture

Personally, I think that we too often limit ourselves to the confined boxes of our problems, narrowing down the definitions and seeing only tiny elements instead of the whole issue. 

When we focus on the insides of a closed box, it’s difficult to see what links to it from the outside and what thereby influences the processes within. The big picture may show you the actual connections and implications that are there, the dependencies and relationships with the outer world. Let me use a metaphor to illustrate it. 

Imagine a flat surface. On it, lives a two-dimensional being – a line or a dot. One day, a 3D ball goes through the surface – from one side to the other. Do you know what our 2D being would see? Ripples… Like on water after dropping a rock into it. At first, the circles would be getting bigger, then smaller again until they would eventually disappear. Without understanding the 3D world and what happens outside of its flat surface, our 2D being would not be able to understand that those circles were even connected! And that the process of the ball going through the surface caused the ripples.

The bigger picture, among helping us with lots of topics as you will see below, also helps to understand the rules which we dislike. Sometimes things that don’t make sense at first, start making it when we see the bigger picture. Two metaphors in one section may be too much, but I’ll go for it anyway.

We all know how to drive, right? We all think we are capable drivers and because of that, some regulations are overdone, they are too strict and we don’t have to follow them. But the bigger picture is that there are drivers of different ages, some less experienced, some only starting to adventure of driving, some are not aware of how ill they are (think: heart conditions), some are simply… less generously equipped by nature. The regulations need to cover all of people, not only those who are capable drivers. The bigger picture changes your perspective (or should change it), sometimes even shifting the problem definition, or eliminating the problem we thought existed at first. 

A pattern is just an effect

Patterns are tricky. We see patterns even when there are none. It’s our way to simplify our lives, so there is no wonder we want to see patterns everywhere. At the same time, the right pattern recognition is an element of critical thinking – or independent thinking – but it’s only an element, not the goal.

When I think “pattern” I see a repetitive behaviour which not only reoccurs in a predictable manner but which is also caused by something else. The best patterns are shared by many people or phenomena. If I go for a walk every day – it’s my pattern. It’s still a pattern but it’s a micro-scale one, and unless you want to abduct me, it’s probably useless to you. If everyone around the world starts going for a daily walk, it will be a much more interesting thing. It would tell that there’s something out there that causes it, and it may be worth looking into. This is where the bigger picture comes in handy. 

A pattern on its own is just an observation, a set of data. So if you see a pattern – good for you, but it’s what causes the pattern that’s interesting. What makes it happen and why? What purpose does the pattern serve or what role does it play? Is the cause and the connection something you can actually verify? 

A pattern is also just like an idea – unless confirmed (or implemented) it exists only in your head. Which brings me to the next point which is… 

Cross-checking

One of the many flawed things we do as people is that when we have an idea we are so happy with it, that we ignore the most important step – checking if the idea or conclusion is right. I know how difficult it is to admit to failure, especially when we are starting to believe in our brilliance. After all, it’s safer not to find out that our idea is rubbish. This way we can retain our self-confidence. But this is what critical thinking actually is. It’s not only questioning others but also questioning ourselves. 

So either confirming (or refuting) the conclusion empirically or with different data is the key to success. And a single check is not enough here, the more the better. 

There is also one thing to be wary of. It’s the often used (and abused) term “pseudoscience”. One of the elements that pseudoscience lacks is falsifiability. It means that no matter what results of a test there are, they always confirm the pseudoscientific hypothesis (“exception that proves the rule” is what I’m talking about; this phrase actually angered me since I was like 6 🙂 ). The key is to build the hypothesis in such a way that you can disprove it too, not only prove it. 

Correlation is not causation

If I’d gotten a dollar each time someone told me that during my psychology studies, I would have been able to pay for my research being published open access. 🙂

Everyone knows that correlation is not causation (and if you didn’t you do now), so why am I saying it? Because there’s more to it than just that. If two elements are correlated, they have something in common. A correlation is not accidental unless, of course, the accident is a mistake one makes when analysing the data. So instead of ignoring it, saying that this is not cause and effect and only a meaningless correlation – look for the bigger picture. 

Truth is, they may impact one another and the impact may even be bi-directional. Correlation does not equal causation but causation still implies correlation. They may also have an element in common that is influenced by a variable you haven’t thought about, and which may be the key to it all. Finally, they may then have a mediator, a variable that stands between them, working kind of like a catalyst. No matter which option it is – a correlation is never a stopping point in the thinking process, it’s just a step on the way to finding an answer. 

What made it possible for me (and what you may want to learn)

You may think that learning problem-solving techniques, years of doing the analysis at work, studying abstract math during my IT education, or learning the research methods during my psychology studies made it possible to use critical thinking every day. But the truth is that to answer that, I need to go back in time a bit more. Like 27 years back. 

Mathematical logic and set theory

Well… you may say I was lucky – lucky enough to be taught all that when I was in my first year of high school. It, very likely, made my life easier, but it’s never too late to understand its basics.

If you’ve never been exposed to maths logic, try to understand implications, equivalent, and converse in the mathematical sense of those. Try the tautologies next. If you still have some power left, go for different types of proofs or at least the proof by contradiction and seek to comprehend the logic behind it, as it really helps to identify wrong conclusions. Last but not least, figure out deductive, inductive and mixed reasoning, and then fallacies. 

Why and how does it help? Unlike other sciences, maths never forgives when you do something wrong. A mistake means you get a wrong result, as there is no (or little) fuzziness in maths. The mathematical logic is bulletproof, and if you experience it once you will know what to look for in people’s thinking. It works like a baseline for analysis of many kinds. 

Asking questions about the right things

When I was learning counselling and coaching, I was told that it was a skill of asking the right questions or thinking using questions. This isn’t exactly right. It’s not about thinking with questions, but knowing what to ask about. 

This is what counselling and interrogations have in common. As Avinoam Sapir says, “When you shut up your brain and just listen, the question will follow”. You have to give yourself a chance to process what people say, in order to react to it. 

It’s not about finding flaws in everything people say. Instead, it’s about finding the missing data and missing elements of the puzzle, the deductions they made too abruptly, the data sources they did not check, the conclusions they did not verify using other data, and finally – their thinking biases. These are the areas to question. When we know what is missing, the question becomes obvious. 

What makes disbelief and misbelief different

It may seem that questioning the status quo can lead us to all kinds of conspiracy theories. After all, we start by disbelieving what we are told, e.g. what the media tell us, so we may naturally fall into the trap of accepting the less common beliefs. 

So what makes them different? How do we know that we get to the bottom of things without falling into false beliefs? 

This is where all the verification comes in, where the bigger picture comes in handy, seeing not only the patterns but the reasons for them to appear in the first place, and verifying what you think with other sources of data. 

We fall into the ease of thinking like other people naturally, and truth be told there is no difference if we accept a proper concept or a conspiracy theory – often it’s only luck of being exposed to the right stuff rather than the wrong one. There is no actual difference in the process of using critical thinking on the proven and generally accepted theories or on the conspiracy ones. And if you treat those two differently upfront, it means you are biased. 

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If you want some good resources, I’ve got this for you – https://open.library.okstate.edu/criticalthinking/ It’s a free book on logic and fallacies (also linked above). Grab a copy and read it if this is new to you. 

If you need a resource on the actual toolset, i.e. the hammers and screwdrivers here is a good one – https://www.amazon.com/Thinkers-Toolkit-Powerful-Techniques-Problem/dp/0812928083

And one on asking questions – https://www.amazon.com/Co-Active-Coaching-Fourth-transformative-conversations/dp/1473674980

The rest of it is called practice.  🙂