Anthropological Thinking: The Advantages Of Critical Thinking

What is Critical Thinking?

What is critical thinking? Critical thinking is a type of thinking that involves actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication as a guide to belief and action. Critical thinking is in the same family as scientific thinking, mathematical thinking, historical thinking, anthropological thinking, economic thinking, moral thinking and physiological thinking. Critical thinking has been argued over possibly having two different components. The first is a set of information and belief generating and processing skills. The second component is the habit, based on intellectual commitment,

The first example of an advantage is that it saves you time. This type of thinking teaches you to prioritize your time and resources by analyzing what is essential to the process. This helps you know what decision is overall a good one. A second advantage to using critical thinking is that it teaches you to have a appreciation of different worldviews. “Critical Thinking enables you to see beyond, not judge, cultural norms and learn how to understand other factors that can influence decision-making.” (Regan) Having empathy and understanding is very important to have effective teamwork and leadership. Another advantage of using critical thinking is gaining enhanced communication. Critical thinking teaches you to analyze and build your evidence for any given premise, which ends up making you a more effective communicator. When communicating a proposal or idea proficiently, you need to have consistent and relevant points to support your theory. A fourth advantage to using a critical thinking is decision making becomes a lot easier. When using critical thinking, you begin to work on a more analytical and considered bias and leave behind intuition and guesswork decision making. A fifth and final advantage to using critical thinking is that it will help you become a more reasoned and balanced problem solver. Making decisions using logic instead of emotions or instinct makes for better problem

Once you become a confident critical thinker, it can start to change you in good and bad ways. One example of a disadvantage to using critical thinking is that you can possibly get an ego boost and start to try to outshine others with your knowledge and background facts. Everyone has room to grow and expand their knowledge and not everyone does that at the same time. Feeling/acting like you’re better than others can really knock down your amount of friends/acquaintances and leave you alone in the end. A second disadvantage to using critical thinking is that you can possibly become too “critical” and end up disapproving everyone else's ideas and plans over yours. This one ties back in with the last disadvantage. Summing the two up, when using critical thinking, keep