Rhetoric of Critical Thought Common Analytical Errors

¶ … Rhetoric of Critical Thought

Daniel Kahneman, who wrote "Thinking, Fast and Slow," has spent many years dissecting the way people think, and how they arrive at thoughts. He is a psychologist who for many years worked with a fellow psychologist named Amos Tversky who passed away before the two could publish much of their findings and win the Nobel Prize. However, his greatest work, and Nobel Prize, were not for psychology (for which there is no Nobel), was for economics. Kahneman developed a method for determining how people would gamble if the end choice was a known. He is a prolific author and thinker who was primarily interested in error.

In his book, he details how he and his colleague Tversky came across errors in judgment that are fundamental to much of research, and much of how people anecdotally see each other. The observances he made took place over a period of more than 30 years during which he used them to create prospect theory, corollaries in behavioral economics and other advances. He determined that there are a number of errors to which people are prone which impede their use of critical thinking. He said that there are two systems controlling the brain, System I and System II, the first of which is "gullible and biased to believe" and the second "is in charge of doubting and unbelieving" (81). His belief is that if the first system somehow overrides the second, or if the second system is somehow otherwise engaged, people will make errors in judgment because System I is prone to make them. This paper looks at three of the errors people commonly make when it comes to critical thinking -- exaggerated emotional coherence, intensity matching and the anchoring effect.

Exaggerated Emotional Coherence

There is a phenomenon that is common in people regardless their desire to suppress it. Exaggerated emotional coherence, more popularly known as the halo effect, is defined by Kahneman as "the tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person -- including things you have not observed" (82). He basically illustrates it by using politics. In the United States, there are two primary parties which pretty much rule political discourse. These two parties have been labeled, by many as adhering to either conservative or liberal principles which are diametrically opposed to one another. This makes it easy for adherents of one party or the other to agree vehemently with one side while dismissing everything that the other side says. When observed from the outside this is obviously flawed logic since no person is correct about an issue 100% of the time, but that is the strength of the halo effect.

Kahneman says this happens as a sort of layering effect. Thinking of the politician, they may say one thing that an individual agrees with, then a columnist the individual likes has good things to say about the politician, then a close personal friend reports that they too think that the politicians stances are sound. This layering of opinions, whether they take place in the conscious or unconscious, adds to the favorable or unfavorable opinion that individual has about the politician. Eventually, if the individual hears enough positive statements from enough people they consider influential, they will apply the halo effect to all of the politicians statements and actions.

It actually does not matter how this is applied. Critical thinking is subverted by this flaw in judgment because the individual becomes irrational in their acceptance or vilification of an idea or a person. The bias is an unknown danger to the act of critical thinking because when this issue or person becomes the focus of critical thought, they have achieved a position that allows System I thinking to overshadow reason and System II thinking.

He also said that words mean things (83). When a person was described using certain bias-filled words (generous, kind, envious, hateful) people came to believe this about them and find it impossible to reverse their first impressions. He tried an experiment on himself when he found he was grading tests according to the halo effect, and found that people need to "decorrelate error" (83). By this he means that to critically evaluate a person's statements, each must be taken as a separate entity and evaluated on its own merits.

Intensity Matching

Because of personal biases that have been forged in the fires of experience, people tend to label things and give them levels of intensity. Many do not just dislike the taste of liver, they hate liver. This labeling of intensity though can be shown to cloud judgment also. Because a particular taste, smell, person, idea has been labeled with either a strong or weak intensity, it is likely to have that regardless the circumstance.

About this particular bias Kahneman says "Here we encounter a new aptitude of System I. An underlying scale of intensity allows matching across diverse dimensions. If crimes were colors, murder would be a deeper shade of red than theft" (94). He also says that this type of bias is common to people within the same "social milieu" (94). He means that people tend to flock with others who have similar social outlooks. The problem with this is that it is impossible to actually transfer these gradations across even similar subject matter, but people invariably do. The example for this is that an individual is told that a lady learned to read when she was four years old. Immediately the listener translates this into a guess about her IQ. Most likely, the person guessing about IQ would assume that it is higher than average. The issue here is that the two do not necessarily correlate, but System I is happy to think that they do and System II usually does not disagree. True critical thought about business or economic matters has to be free from such spurious grading because add causation or take it away where neither is justified.

Anchoring Effect

The principles that Kahneman outlined all have to do with preconceived notions that illogically bias people. This does not mean that the principles are correct every time, but they are so consistent that they have become very reliable predictors of behavior. This is also true of the anchoring effect.

People see reference points to something and it is difficult to let those points go even if they have no relation to the actual event. Kahneman uses the example that "If you were asked whether Ghandi was 114 years old when he died you will end up with a much higher estimate of his death than you would if the anchoring question referred to death at 35" (119). Basically if it is suggested that a some sample is probably going to be a certain number, then they will subconsciously gravitate toward that number in their own estimate. It is akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Given a probable point of reference, a person will use that to set their personal reference point.