Who's Minding the Mind? New York Times -- July 31, 2007 by Benedict Carey "In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee ... The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup ... That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java ... Findings like this one, as improbable as they seem, have poured forth in psychological research over the last few years. New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it ... Psychologists say that “priming” people in this way is not some form of hypnotism, or even subliminal seduction; rather, it’s a demonstration of how everyday sights, smells and sounds can selectively activate goals or motives that people already have ... 'When it comes to our behavior from moment to moment, the big question is, 'What to do next?,' said John A. Bargh, a professor of psychology at Yale and a co-author, with Lawrence Williams, of the coffee study, which was presented at a recent psychology conference. 'Well, we’re finding that we have these unconscious behavioral guidance systems that are continually furnishing suggestions through the day about what to do next, and the brain is considering and often acting on those, all before conscious awareness' ... Dr. Bargh added: 'Sometimes those goals are in line with our conscious intentions and purposes, and sometimes they’re not.'-- Read the Full Article Commentary by Hunter Finch The study highlighted in this article provides further evidence that our behavior is too often driven by the subtlest of subliminal influences and social conditioning. Our judgments and convictions are no less immune from such non-objective, non-critical thinking. ###
American-Style
Universities Prove Popular in
the Arab World ###
Professors
Instill Biblical Skepticism
Tucson Citizen --July 17, 2007 by Shaunti Feldhahn: From the Right "I remember my shock in graduate school
when a teacher's assistant assumed
that 'only poorly educated, simple people believe the Bible is
literally true'
- and how shocked she was when several highly educated,
critical-thinking
graduate students defended biblical literalism ... A May Gallup Poll
showed
that one-third of Americans take the Bible literally but that the more
educated
they were, the less likely that was ... Those with college and
graduate-school
educations were most likely to believe the Bible was 'inspired' by God
(not
man-made 'ancient fables or history') but least likely to take it
literally
... Why? Our culture is led and populated by those who have had
biblical
skepticism drummed into them by humanistic college professors ... If a
student
manages to arrive at college with literal views of the Bible intact,
his
'naiveté' is quickly attacked by professors - classroom sages
who are overwhelmingly
humanistic and liberal in their worldviews." -- Read
the Full Article
Commentary by Hunter Finch When education comes from a pedagogical culture that "drums" or indoctrinates or brainwashes information and understandings into you, it's easy to become intellectually handicapped. Critical thinkers need to recognize that everybody comes, in some measure, to objective reasoning by way of such conditioning. To this extent, we are all intellectually handicapped and have an obligation -- not only to ourselves, but to each other -- to independently climb out of our intellectual baggage, take the blinders off, look around, reconcile our prejudices and shortsightednesses with continual and better insights as we make midcourse adjustments in our understandings and judgments living out our lives. Socrates is alleged to have given us, "The unexamined life isn't worth living." Critical thinkers accept this sentiment as central to all insights, understandings, and reconciliation. Anything less undermines our willingness to question, reexamine, reconcile, and discover the deeper insights that life has to offer. This is as true of those who come from the left side of humanist traditions as it is of those who come from the right. By definition, critical thinking encourages disciplined independent thought that avoids the pedagogical cults and cultures that would have us accept life's absolute truths based on arguments by authority. It is a seminal concept and cadre of best practices that approaches discovery with a healthy measure of skepticism rooted in deep humility for the "truths" one doesn't fully understand rather than in an unhealthy cynicism for why others don't see or accept the absolute "truths" as we have been told they are. Critical thinking isn't about competing, debating, winning or correcting everyone else's thinking. Rather, it's about you and only you. As when playing golf, it is less about beating the others in the foursome, than it is about playing to your own handicaps. Because, ultimately -- no matter where we come from or what we've been exposed to -- each of us is self educated. We can't know anything we haven't thought. ###
Critical
Thinking Must Have Heart
Joseph Bernard Blog -- July 2, 2007 by Joseph Bernard "I wanted to follow up on the Critical Thinking post yesterday. At the end I added heart and I wanted to say more about that today and also about intuition as a key component of this kind of expanded thinking ... You have to have heart in all your critical thinking or you can make rational decision about things that are wrong. Wrong in that the heart or compassion is missing so things like going to war, creating more nuclear weapons or profits at any cost can be ok from a thought process but totally lack any thinking about what is good for humanity. Heartless rational decisions are made every day and they miss the mark to the detriment of us humans and the planet. Critical thinking without heart is just a mental exercise. " -- Read the Full Article Commentary by Hunter Finch Here's an example of where our suppositions and specific definitions of terms may or may not, conflict with various concepts of critical thinking. If one accepts critical thinking as a process of confronting emotional attachments to long held, unexamined beliefs -- and if one reads these terms as inherently emotional -- the applications of "intuitions" and "heart" would seem to be at odds with the process of thinking critically around and through one's own emotions. Yet, if our foundational assumption is that reason is likely to be more enlightening, useful and honest than non-reason, our intuitive instincts provide a fundamental basis for critical questioning and inquiry. It isn't always comfortable to be intellectually honest with oneself. Therefore, if in the term "heart," there is a suggestion one thinks more critically when they let their visceral instincts dictate their thoughts, nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, making "rational decisions" void of empathy, fair-mindedness, and other essential intellectual traits is not definitive of critical thinking either. That said, critical thinking requires a high degree of emotional as well as intellectual stamina; i.e., a tenacious perseverance based on a heart-felt conviction that critical reasoning provides more light and lasting value to us over non-reason. ###
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