CRITICAL THINKING AND YOUR PSYCHO-LOGICS

A very common assumption which is sure to get you in trouble is assuming that people are rational, reasonable, and logical in the same way. Even worse is assuming that you are rational, reasonable and logical as others are! Is that shocking? I hope you find it shocking. If you do, I also hope you are interested in finding out what these words mean.

What are we saying and signifying when we talk about rationality?

Here is what the dictionary gives us this about rational: “Having or exercising reason, sound judgment, or good sense; endowed with the faculty of reason; agreeable to reason; reasonable; sensible; reckoning, calculation, reason.”

On first glance it seems that we are saying that how we are thinking is characterized by what all rational people agree is logical and reasonable. Yet take a moment and think about that. That’s assuming a lot, wouldn’t you say? And, doesn’t all of our experience go against it? After all, if we all agreed on what is rational— logical and reasonable— wouldn’t we all be pretty much of the same opinion, point of view, and values about things?

What makes this challenging is that there are many kinds of reasoning and ways to reason. There are many ways to reckon, calculate, and making judgments. As I have been mapping out how “thinking” works in Neuro-Semantic NLP, all the levels of “thoughts” (multi-ordinality), the meta- levels that we create by meta-stating, I have used Korzybski’s distinguish which he made about our human psycho-logics.

Korzybski created this distinguish by hyphenating the word “psychology.” Doing that generates “psycho-logics” and “psycho-logisticians.” This speaks about how a person in his or her self (psyche) reasons (logics). At the simplest level, we reason by associating one thing with another. It doesn’t even have to make sense, it may hardly have a strong correlation, but if a person links one thing with another, then lo and behold, they then conclude that they are linked and they then reckon that the things are intricately connected.

I wrote about the story in Mind-Lines of a little eight-year old boy who was talking-back to his mother and just when she said, “If you talk back to your mother, something bad will happen!” an earthquake shook the San Francisco area causing everything to fall down—pieces of the ceiling came crashing down, the whole house began to shake, things on shelves tumbled to the ground. Thereafter, within that young boy, speaking-back was associated with a deep dread and fear. Here’s an association— an interpersonal conflict linked to an earthquake leaving the boy with a strong associative feeling that its bad to speak-back. Logical? Well, not to the outside. But yes, to the inside experience— very logical. For the boy, it describes his psycho-logics.

The girl who associates eating food with being fat develops her particular brand of psycho-logics. Thereafter when someone tries to reason with her that she can eat and not get fat, it doesn’t make sense. To her, it is not logical. Once she put “eating” into the category of “fat,” that classification began governing her way of thinking, reasoning, and calculating. In her psycho-logics, it makes perfect sense that if you eat, you get fat, you lose control.

Here then is a double-bind situation for developing healthy and accurate critical thinking skills. If we all have developed our own internal psycho-logics (which we have)—then our thinking itself is the problem. So how can we think our way to more correct and accurate thinking? How can we engage in a learning process to learn critical thinking skills?

There’s several aspects to the answer. Part of the answer lies in first recognizing and accepting the fallibility of our thinking. Once we do that, then we can start questioning our logics. A great question to begin with is: Could you be wrong? Could you be mis-perceiving, mis-calculating, mis- understanding? Could there be a bias that’s creating an illusion or deception? This begins the questioning. The next thing to do is to expose our pyscho-logics.

This is why we “climb the ladder of meaning,” moving up the logical levels to examine what conclusions we have drawn and the kind of thinking that we used in drawing those conclusions. How do we do this? Accept and embrace what the person says and inquire: Help me to understand how you came to that conclusion. What are you selecting to focus on? How are you thinking about that? What are you assuming to be true to reason in that way?

To further help us do that we can use several list of distinctions: the Meta-Program distinctions, the Cognitive Distortions list, and the Cognitive Biases list.

The Meta-Program list gives us a very wide range of common thinking patterns which we all use everyday as we process information. All of these have useful and very effective applications and equally, every one can be mis-used and mis-applied. The list of Cognitive Distortions were created by Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck in the field of Rational-Emotive Therapy and Cognitive Therapy and these identify childish thinking patterns which set us up for exaggeration and misery. The list of Cognitive Biases is a list of built-in tendencies of our brain and nervous system for mis-perceiving, mis-understanding, distorting information, etc. There are a great many of these, some are of common knowledge, some are just now being identified by new discoveries in the Neuro-Sciences.