Critical Thinking Characteristics

Personality characteristics that are most likely to enhance the development of critical thinking skills and their effective application in both academic and daily life? It’s probably not terribly helpful to think of them as personality “traits” - that is, the kind of characteristics that are more or less inborn or established so early and deeply that their condition pretty much everything one does. Rather, the characteristics that facilitate critical thinking are really aspects of an individual’s thinking process that may be variably exercised in particular situations, but that can be systematically developed and learned and their application encouraged through training and experience.Fairness: an acknowledgment that there may be multiple valid

But this is certainly a reasonable list that probably covers most of the key elements. How can we apply these qualities in practical analytical situations? As we noted at several points, there are certain inherent tensions involved in trying to put these values into practice; each of them carried to an extreme often contradicts others.Fairness and empathy are characteristics that we demonstrate in the dialogue. It does little good to proclaim ourselves fair and empathic if we, in fact, are arbitrary and rejecting of other points of view of the top. They are virtues best practiced in silence; calling attention to one’s fairness and empathy is not merely bad manners, but generally counterproductive, since if you need to assert your own qualities here, you’re probably not adequately demonstrating them in practice. `However, empathy and fairness, and their neural and psychological underpinnings are rarely linked and discussed together even though they share common

pg. 25).Integrity and confidence are also characteristics that complement each other. While they are essential underpinnings to effective critical thinking, they are also easy to push too far without necessarily being aware of the chilling impact one might be having on dialogue. Finally, openness is something continually demonstrated in the course of dialogue. Once again, in practice, this may mean many different things. It does not mean that one is obligated to accept arrant nonsense or demonstrably false statements into evidence, nor to accept a chain of reasoning that does not conform to the rules and standards. It does mean that where challenges are made, they are done in a respectful and issue-oriented manner and that the issues are engaged rather than the individuals expressing those