Language Department Thinking Critically About

Language Department

"Thinking Critically About Assessing Risk" was an interesting section from chapter eight of the textbook. It asks how we can improve our risk assessment. First of all, the section talks about how in a 2006 poll 40% of Americans said that they did not fear flying whatsoever. However, "those same Americans were 170 times more likely to die in an automobile or pickup truck crash than on a scheduled flight in the years 2005 to 2007 (Myers 2012). So what is it about flying that scares us when really we should be worrying more about driving or riding in cars?

Myers (2012) notes that we react the way we do today because of how we were conditioned in our ancestral days. We have an old brain and a new brain. Our old brain tells us that we should fear things like snakes and bugs even though there are worse things out there that can kill us -- for example, cigarettes, as Myers (2012) notes. If we were bitten by a snake or a bug a long time ago, it might be life-threatening. Also, the fact that bugs or snakes might more easily make their way into a cave still stays with us. It is much more unlikely that this things will make their way into our safe and secure homes. Yet we still fear them as if we live in caves. It is the old brain that tells us that we should be afraid of heights -- thus the fear of flying. It is also the fact that we have a fear of things that we can't control. It would be easy for us to think that we have control of our cars. We can put on our brakes, pull over, or get out -- after, all we are driving the car. or, if we're not driving the car, we may think we have more control because of the fact that we are on the ground. Put us in the air and we can't do anything should anything happen to the plane. We, as humans, cannot fly on our own.

RA: Chapter eight also talks about assessing intelligence and there are many ways to do so. Intelligence, however, doesn't just refer to more analytical type of thinking. In the article "Emotional intelligence: A promise unfulfilled?" authors Matthew, Zeidner and Roberts (2012) discuss how emotional intelligence is a fairly new construct in differential psychology. There are many proponents of this construct and they have made powerful arguments for emotional intelligence's importance in both basic and applied psychology (2012).