Are you an unreflective thinker?

Gabriel Wilensky

You may be aware that all of us can improve our thinking skills. We can all become better critical thinkers. Without this ability, we are merely unreflective thinkers. This is the natural state where most people are, even if they don’t know or acknowledge it. Most people don’t even know their thoughts are something that needs directing. When they think, they are largely unaware their thinking may cause problems. They are largely oblivious to what extent our natural thinking abilities are flawed and require active intervention.

Most people are subject to the prejudices and biases of the social environment they live in. Most people effortlessly and automatically conform to the norms and beliefs of their social or ethnic environment. They naturally take on the group’s identity and act as they are expected to act without ever questioning whether these things are the right things to do. Most people are unaware of our mind’s natural tendency towards self-deception, and of finding and using rationalizations or excuses for not doing the things you should be doing.

Most people are subject to the prejudices and biases of the social environment they live in.

We can all become better critical thinkers. Without this ability, we are merely unreflective thinkers.

If you are an unreflective thinker you will need to look at all these things and much more, and acquire the tools and strategies you need to move up from a state of unreflective thinking to one of strong critical thinking.

Perhaps at work you’ve had the experience of confronting many folks who were unreflective thinkers and you had to work with them to help them understand the biases they had. Maybe you had to help members of your team make good, compelling arguments when making a business presentation or a case for a product or feature. Perhaps you had to fight ingrained prejudices and assumptions that folks tried to impose on whatever work process you were involved in.

It’s possible you had to face and expose the consequences of people relinquishing their thinking faculties. All sorts of bad things happen when unreflective thinkers submit to social prejudices and biases, when they allow their minds to be infected by superstition and religious sociocentrism, and when they conform to a national or religious agenda of the worst, most virulent and ultimately genocidal type.

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Most people are unreflective thinkers who coast through life without ever questioning anything of any real depth.

      How and why do people do these things? What are the mechanisms that lead good individuals to do bad things? There are many aspects to this questions, but there are two key things to keep in mind here: first, most people are unreflective thinkers who coast through life without ever questioning anything of any real depth, without ever wondering whether their egocentric impulses are good or bad, and whether the sociocentric influences they imbibed when growing up are any good for themselves or for others. Second, precisely because most people are unreflective thinkers they can and typically are manipulated by unscrupulous politicians, advertisers, and others on the Internet.

It behooves all of us to change this and promote critical thinking. If we are able to improve our own thinking, and that of others, we will eventually make the world a better place!

Head in the sand image – Sander van der Wel from Netherlands, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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DON’T LET PEOPLE INFLUENCE YOU WITHOUT YOU EVEN REALIZING!

Enter your information to get our FREE practice exercises so you can train yourself to recognize subtle persuasion techniques.

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