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Alexey Kapterev: Critical Thinking 101 (Part 1)

On April 25, as part of the “MSU 2020 Training Day,” Alexey Kapterev made a presentation on critical thinking. We present you the transcript of the lecture.



Introduction


My name is Alex, I’m a presentation coach. My acquaintance with the topic of critical thinking began with a presentation. I even remember from which particular presentation, a man named Amy Cuddy at the TED conference. This presentation was wildly popular, a few months ago there were 48 million views, this is the second most popular presentation on this site, it must be a good presentation.



If anyone does not know, TED is a kind of mecca of oratory trainers, perhaps this is the best thing that has happened with the presentation world over the past 30 years. Bill Clinton, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, many Nobel laureates spoke at this conference, so the place is quite respected.



Amy Kadi, a professor at Harvard Business School, spoke on an article she published with two co-authors. Its main co-author is Dan Carney, a very respected person in the world of psychology, professor at the Business School named after Haas at Berkeley. Berkeley gave the world more Nobel laureates than the entire Soviet Union.

In this article, researchers asked two questions:



These are two hormones, testosterone gives confidence, and cortisol, the stress hormone, the hormone from which you begin to get nervous.

Is it possible to take a neuro-endocrine focus after taking a certain position for 2 minutes?

If you are suddenly wondering what these poses are, here they are:



In principle, nothing unexpected, people often like to stand that way, this is some kind of symbol of victory, and vice versa, if we see that a person has contracted, he probably does not feel very well.

It is clear that this is communication, so they manifest themselves, but does this not accidentally affect them?



We found that strong postures increase a person's risk appetite, increase testosterone levels and lower cortisol levels. Weak poses are the other way around. It turns out that there is a feedback loop, it acts in both directions. Cool discovery!

In my opinion, the situation is not bad:


  1. We have a respected conference, albeit not a scientific one, but a lot of people from science speak at this conference, there are no complaints about the conference.
  2. The study involved 3 reputable business schools.
  3. The study was based on an article published 2 years ago in a good peer-reviewed publication of the American Psychological Association 2 years ago. If the publication would have caused strong criticism, it is unlikely that they would make a speech on its basis.

In addition, before them were experiments by the German scientist Fritz Strack, who inserted people with a pencil like this and they watched comics or cartoons:



It turned out that people who smiled with a pencil rated the comic book higher, they liked it more.



When I watched this speech, I thought: "More likely than not."

Somewhere here our hero bursts in, this is Fry from Futurama, a very critical-minded character who sees that there is a yes / no dilemma in the question that I asked.



And the first commandment of critical thinking is not to be locked in dilemmas. Those. if you can find some third way, then look for the third way. This greatly improves the quality of thinking and, ultimately, the quality of your decisions.

At the same moment, we recall that there is a different force of evidence. For example, American legal practice uses the following gradations:



I would say that in this situation I am inclined to consider this significant evidence, if translated into percentages - 60-70%. And then the chronology of how events developed:



In general, Kadi claims that people like to stand in a strong position, which is pretty expected, because often during experiments people give socially expected answers, which has been demonstrated.

Do we now have enough reason to believe that power poses work? Looks like no. The facts have changed, and I have changed my opinion.

TED has not changed his mind. This is very interesting. The second most popular presentation on their website, they left it, did not make any caption stating that this had long been refuted.



They made a small postscript in 2017, which is hard to find, that there is still debate. In reality, there were already disputes, it was clear that this was all crap.



Could we somehow find out before this scandal came out?
Yes they could.



Accordingly, such presentations will be much more popular.

But, if you look inside, follow the links, look at Google Scholar, try to find an article that can be in the public domain (it is publicly available), and look inside the chart, you will immediately see huge measurement errors that overlap the effect .



How did it happen? They had a small control group.



Groups of 100 people, or even 21 people, may produce statistical noise during research. There is a classic question about a coin that is flipped 100 times, how many times will the tails be thrown?

The answer looks something like this:



It seems that Kadi and Carney got a random noise. Which doesn't stop people like Tony Robbins from showing these slides to people at all:



Entire editions of magazines have already come out that told what we learned from this story, but Robbins continues to insist that it is true when everyone around said no.

This is called "bullshit", or in Russian "nonsense." And this is what critical thinking fights. If critical thinking has an enemy, then it is an enemy.



There are a lot of such things in business training.



At every second public speaking training, they say that non-verbal communication is 93% of all communication, which is not entirely true.

The theory of generations, which is not critically transferred from American soil to Russian. We did not have a generation of boomers, we have boomers - this is generally a car.

All typologies, socionics, MBTI, DISK - modern psychology, as it were, does not support the division of people into 4 categories, or 16.

All visuals, audials, kinesthetics that have been searched for for 40 years can not be found.

Brainstorms that degrade the quality of the generated hypothesis.

There are a lot of them, and we are fighting this.



In Russia, it seems to me, this is a separate headache - homeopathy in pharmacies, psychics on TV, etc. I have a feeling that it’s worse with us than in the countries of the first world, but this is just my feeling, I don’t know how it really is.

There is some kind of narrative, such a point of view that the Russian people are trusting. I saw here a study by Edelman, which examines the credibility of the press, government, businesses and public institutions in different countries.



And Russia is stable there in one of the last places, and this year in the very last. This means that bulshit is quite common, because we do not trust anything.



This is an important problem for me, but the point, apparently, is not that we are gullible, we are rather mistrustful, but that we do not use critical thinking as intended.



We believe what is not worth it, but, on the contrary, does not believe what it would be worth. We lack critical thinking with an emphasis on the word thinking. We have some critical intuition.



We tend to distrust when “we feel inside that something is wrong,” while we are not inclined to go into the argument at the same time.

It seems to me that this is a problem, and I am convinced that something can be done about it. I do not believe that I can do it alone, but maybe with your help?



What is critical thinking? The question is, from what sources can we learn what critical thinking is? Because the first commandment of critical thinking is not to trust anyone, look for reliable sources of information.

In 1990, the American Psychological Association made a big report using the Delphi method, and gave birth to an unreadable and unrecorded definition:



I have one small complaint to this definition, to the word "independent". I find more evidence that critical thinking is not independent thinking. It is very difficult to think critically alone. As a rule, critical thinking lives in groups, or at least in pairs.

There is a famous metaphor about the rider and the elephant. An elephant is unconscious, it is 98% of all our cognitive abilities, our intuition, our intuition. And the rider is a small, about 2%, evolutionarily new topic with rational rational thinking.



Basically, what a rider does is to justify the emotional impulses of an elephant. The elephant wants a cake, and the rider comes up with a bunch of excuses why the cake is useful.

There was such an American statistician and mathematician John Tukey, who is famous for having coined the word “bit”. In the 80s, he introduced a very important “discriminator” that there is such a brain mode when you confirm what you want to confirm. But there is one when you are in free open research, when you are really looking for the truth.



We have our “rider,” who has two functions: the function of a spokesperson who is ready to justify absolutely all decisions despite the fact that he does not participate in these decisions, and they themselves are somehow accepted internally; and the function of the scientist. The scientist, just doing research.

And this research function is launched very rarely, very reluctantly, and only in the company.



This audience should be well informed, i.e. it should be people who "get along" simply do not eat.

This should be an audience whose opinion you do not know in advance because otherwise you begin to say what they want to hear.

And this should be an audience that is really interested in the truth, which is very important. Those. they should have such a disposition. They should want to find the truth, and not just get some "nishtyaki".



Most American philosophers in the report agree with this. They believe that critical thinking is not just about skills. The minority believes that critical thinking is skills. And 61% believe that critical thinking is not only skills, but also disposition.

This is a set of values, values. People must want to find the truth. Not everyone wants to find the truth, someone is happy. I very often hear this argument: "It just works, but the truth does not interest me." And you can always ask the question: “How do you know that this works? Is it true that it works? ” And most often people do not care.

Critical thinking is evaluated by tests. I am not saying that everyone needs to run now and evaluate their level of critical thinking. I will tell you about this so that you simply understand how we know what “critical thinking” is. Why is it needed and how is it useful? Tests that are run on a large number of people give us a fairly large amount of information.

The test has been developed for decades. Watson-Galeser test exists 60-70 years, i.e. it is constantly being improved. This is a very long and very thorough painstaking work. Beware of some “homegrown”, on the knee of the tests of “critical thinking” made, that they measure - no one knows.

There are quite famous tests. Some of them have been translated into Russian. If you meet some kind of critical thinking test, go to google scholar and google the name of this test there. Because no one knows the “homegrown” tests of a lot of what they measure.



For these tests, I can more or less vouch. Some of them have been translated into Russian. Please note California Critical Thinking Disposition (top line), that is, there is a disposition, and there is a second “critical thinking skills”. These are separate tests. One measures your values, and the other measures your critical thinking skills.



In a good way, how is psychometry arranged (the science of psychological dimensions)? What are they doing? They take huge groups of people and run them on the same tests. For example, they take the Hapranovsky test and run the same sample from the IQ test, see the correlation coefficient. And in this way, researchers may find that critical thinking and IQ (IQ) are one and the same. Or not the same thing.



If the correlation coefficient is 0.95, then most likely it is one and the same. If the correlation coefficient is 0.50 (moderate correlation) then, probably, these are two different things.

You can also compare this with character tests, maybe “critical thinking” is a character trait. And we cannot in any way consciously influence this, the character is stable, it changes very slowly.

We can run one test against another, they must have a very high correlation. The Hapranovsky test should be very highly correlated with the Kornelovsky test. Otherwise, one of them is just a very bad test.

And what interests us the most is the results of people in life and at work. Are the results of the critical thinking test correlated with work results. And if they correlate, it means that critical thinking is a good thing, cool and useful. If it does not correlate, then it is not very useful.

I will start with character. Critical thinking does not correlate strongly with character. This is probably good news. Any person, regardless of character, can learn critical thinking, can possess it.



There is a slight correlation (average, as statistics say), 0.28 with a parameter such as openness to new experience, in contrast to conservatism. Those. if you are a person open to new experiences, you most likely have a slight advantage.

So r needs to be squared, 0.28 squared will be 8%. Those. 8% of the discrepancies in critical thinking can be explained by the nature and one specific dimension - openness to experience.

Those. extrovert or introvert - it doesn’t matter. Consensus or conflict is not important. If you are a neurotic, I would expect the neurotics to be more critical, but no. It doesn’t matter if you are an emotionally unstable person, you can also think critically. Good news, critical thinking does not depend much on character.

Farther. If we compare the intelligence quotient and critical thinking, we get a correlation of the order of 0.38, we need to square it, and we get about 16%. This is not bad, but we see that it is clearly not the same thing. Those. we do not see a correlation coefficient of 0.96. Most likely, critical thinking and IQ are very different things, very different psychological constructions.



There is another interesting test called RWO (real world outcomes). There people are asked questions like: “Have you ever got a job?” He is asked to people of different ages, given that some of them have never been arranged. The answer is yes, in most cases, about 95%. Then the next question: “If you got a job, did it happen that you were fired a week after you got a job?” And a certain percentage of people, for example, 15%, says yes.

“Do you have house keys?” - "Yes". “Has it ever happened that you forgot these keys somewhere or locked yourself; slamming the door, leaving the keys of the house? ” A certain percentage of people say yes.

“Do you use social networks?” - "Yes". "Was it that you posted something on social networks, which was why you were in trouble?"

In general, if a person answers “yes” to all these questions, then we have a suitable word for this person - “loser”. This is such a test for losers. It is clear that this is a survey, and it is anonymous, i.e. just so voluntarily no one admits.

But there is a wide range of responses to the survey, and it turns out that, firstly, the results correlate with intelligence. Smarter people are less likely to get into this kind of trouble. The correlation is about 0.26, somewhere around 4%. Not very much, but statistically significant. Secondly, critical thinking is stronger than intelligence explaining this kind of thing. In general, critically minded people are less likely to get into trouble.



But, of course, most critical thinking works at work. I have seen quite a bit of research. The bad news is that most of these studies are sponsored by test makers. The good news is that they more or less show the same figure - about 0.4 - 0.5 correlation, i.e. a quarter of people’s work results.



Especially successes in analytical work can be explained by the level of critical thinking. And therefore, the test for critical thinking is quite widely used in hiring. They are mainly used in law offices and in banks. There, the essence of the work, in fact, is critical thinking. You have to think critically.



Here is the analysis and solution of problems - 0.52, decision-making and judgments - 0.52, Professional technical knowledge and expertise - - 0.48. Somewhere 0.4 - 0.5 correlation coefficient, i.e. somewhere around 25% of the work results we can explain with the critical thinking test.

For comparison, I can say that emotional intelligence accounts for about 8% of work results. Those. critical thinking is much more important than emotional intelligence. IQ explains about the same. Depends on the work. The janitor has less, the top manager has more, but somewhere around 25% of the results are explained by IQ.

The critically minded Fry asks us:



Unfortunately, I have to say that the answer is "Yes, it can." I recently saw a pre-print (not yet published) study. It states the following:



Those. this is another such division of people into black and white; ours against yours. People with critical thinking are good, those without critical are bad. In general, there is such a tendency. But in a song I heard a phrase that the most lonely people in the world are people who are inclined to tell the truth in all situations, critical thinking strongly encourages you to do this.

It improves your social results, work results, but not without problems. You can argue with a lot of people, more accurately.



In addition, I do not have statistical evidence, I judge by myself, critical thinking leads to the analyst’s paralysis, when you start endlessly weighing the pros and cons and as a result you can’t decide anything. In the end, you can toss a coin - also works as a way of making decisions.



There is a big question, can we teach people critical thinking? Maybe it's just innate, genetically determined. For example, IQ is very genetically determined, or character. I met a study that claimed that up to 80% of intelligence is inherited. It is unlikely that this is so in fact, rather 40-50%, with age, by the way, it rises. Critical thinking is also genetically determined, but it can also be taught.



I saw the results of a very good meta-analysis - a short answer: YES.
At the most basic level, we show that both general and contextual skills can be developed among students at all levels and in all disciplines.

What are the ways? Unfortunately, not a lecture.



Argument diagrams are drawing such constructions:



Honestly, I want to know English, if you want to improve yourself on this yourself.



All science in English, tests in English, books in English. Learning English helps a lot.

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To be continued here: Part 2

In the second part, Alexei Kapterev talks about what critical thinking consists of and how to develop it.

thanks
, : Asya_Dyu, KAYANO, , , , , .

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: vk.com/video-69069529_456239045



In the meantime, an entertaining puzzle:

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