Habits that hinder thinking

I want to share parts of a reading material ,'The Art of Thinking' written by Vincent Tran Ruggiero, published by Pearson, 2010.

According to Ruggiero, there are 6 ways that deters forward and critical thinking:
mine-is-better habit, face saving, resistance to change, conformity, stereotyping and self-deception.

The mine-is-better habit

A habit of claiming what's ours always better than others. We are used to the ideas of those which are foreign cannot be better than what we are. We tend to see value things at the pretext, and object to some changes without giving much thought. The mine-is-better habit deters objective thinking and makes us prefer self-flattering errors to unpleasant realities. We are thus advised, to help us thinking better, we should keep our ego from interfering us with the search for truth.

Face saving

It is a natural tendency that arises from our ego. It is not a presumption made earlier but happen after we have uttered or done something and then only realize that what we just did may cause damage to our self-image or image others have of us. It is a kind of defense mechanism. We usually blame someone else for things gone wrong when we are involved with an unwanted situation. We do not want to own up to possible mistake we do. We put blames on others. Sometimes we rationalize the mistake we do - a dishonest substitute to reasoning. The difference between rationalizing and reasoning is, we rationalize when we make the evidence follow our belief and we reason when we make the belief follow the evidence.

Ruggiero advised, to control our face-saving tendency, we must always be alert for occasion when our ego is threatened. A person who makes a mistake and refuses to admit it is thereby compounding the mistake.

Resistance to change

It is a tendency to reject new ideas and new ways of seeing or doing without examining them fairly. One reason for this is plain laziness. Since we are so used to doing something and i seems to be working well, we resist suggestion to do it other way as it may cause us to break our comfortable routine. And also it may suggests us to go against tradition. So we resent the new idea for worry of affronting our family members or society.

Another reason to resist change is fear of change. When we are suggested change, we worry about what may happen as we do not know about our future. But resistance to change will cause us to not finding new discovery, invention, creativity, progress and we remain the same. And to resist change si to set our minds against our own best and most worthwhile ideas.

Conformity

Some are sensible like for example, saying hello when answering a call instead of good bye or does not go beyond the speed limit of the road. being nonconform in such situation may at times cause damage, waste of time or annoy others.

Harmful conformity is according to Ruggiero, what we do instead of thinking in order to belong to a group or avoid the risk of being different. Once we begin to conform, we will do or act similar with others but it may not be the best act for us, we do because it is expected by others. This can affect our creative and critical thinking.

Stereotyping

It is an extreme form of generalizing. Some generalizations can go beyond the boundaries of reasonableness thus overgeneralization. Stereotyping can be even more damaging than overgeneralization. A stereotype is a fixed, unbending generalization, irrationality maintained. Most common are racial, religious and ethnic. things are presorted, predetermined and prejudged. Thus it impedes mind's dynamic activity and forcing everything is to be in certain order and classes and thus impossible to change.

Self deception

Sometimes we are afraid of something, of knowing that we start to deceive ourselves against our own believe. An example is we know about some signs and symptoms that may indicate some diseases but we refuse to belief and we refuse to see the doctor or treatment. Ruggiero suggests that to be a good thinker, we must be able to decide honestly what information we need to solve a problem and acquire that information to help fair evaluation. All we need to do is just be honest to ourselves.

All these six hindrances can be overcome with desire and effort. Ruggiero did suggest how to overcome them...read more from his book.

Happy reading!