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Key points
- The scientific method is a good example of critical thinking’s strengths and fallibility.
- People who value critical thinking often fall into common traps that undermine their power and influence.
- The correct use of critical thinking involves understanding its own limitations.
Critical thinking is important in the workplace and specifically for strengthening your organizational power and influence (as I wrote in “Think You’re Entitled to Your Opinion? Think Again”). But critical thinking is a complex topic, and while it is absolutely important, placing too much importance on it in the wrong kind of way can actually diminish your power and influence. It’s not enough to just know that critical thinking matters. You have to know exactly how and why it matters and how to use it. Thinking critically entails a simultaneous importance and fallibility. This dual awareness is the key to harnessing critical thinking in a way that actually increases your power and influence, not squander it.
Parallels With the Scientific Method
We can understand a lot about the simultaneous importance and fallibility of critical thinking by looking at the scientific method or science itself as a whole. Of course, critical thinking and the scientific method go hand-in-hand insofar as critical thinking, which is broader and more generalized, is the basis of the scientific method.
People often point out that science is flawed or makes mistakes (and here we’re using the terms “science” and “the scientific method” synonymously).
It is true that science can get it wrong. This is because science is practiced by human beings, and human beings are flawed. The scientific method is not an assertion of the absolute objectivity and perfection of science, but rather an ideal to aspire to. Sincere scientists try their best to adhere to that ideal, but try as they might they are still subject to the same human flaws and biases that everyone else is.
Although people often use the word “theory” loosely in everyday life, in science, if something is a theory that means it’s actually been tested rigorously. It means that no tests have, as of yet, proven it wrong—unlike “hypotheses,” which are very often wrong. Yet, at the same time, if science is being done correctly, even tested theories aren’t expressed with 100 percent certainty precisely because, as pointed out, science can make mistakes. But how are those mistakes discovered and corrected? By science! So remarkable is the scientific method that it recognizes its own fallibility when it’s practiced by human beings, and has a built-in method for addressing those mistakes.
And so it is with critical thinking, which underlies the scientific method. As I pointed out in my first article on critical thinking, it can help protect you from the wolves in sheep’s clothing: the charlatans, hucksters, and psychopaths of the world. But part of its greatest value lies in being able to protect you from the potentially trickiest, most dangerous wolf yet: your own mind.
Critical Thinking Reveals Its Own Limitations
How is your own mind a potential danger? There are a number of potential ways but let’s look at some of the most common.
The first is the fallacy that somehow, just by knowing about critical thinking, or by consciously attempting to practice it, we are uniquely able to avoid the biases and mental traps that everyone else is vulnerable to. This might be true some of the time, but it is never true all of the time. It is true that by consciously practicing critical thinking, you’re more likely to avoid many of the common mental traps that befall many people—spotting misinformation on the internet, for example. But there is not a single person alive who is completely free of bias and subjective internal narratives. This means that even if you think people should trust your judgment more than that of others, the truth is that they shouldn’t trust it completely, at least not all of the time. And neither should you. If you do think that people should trust your judgment completely (or that you should trust your own judgment completely), well, you’re not thinking critically.
When you think you’re immune to biases and subjective narratives, what tends to happen is that you use (or, rather, abuse) critical thinking simply to defend your own points of view. This is called weak-sense critical thinking. In contrast, strong-sense critical thinking is using critical thinking to give fair and meaningful consideration to other competing perspectives (which is extremely hard for most people to do), and to scrutinize, question, and at times revise your points of view. It doesn’t mean giving up your points of view, necessarily, but subjecting them to the same scrutiny to which, as critical thinkers, you would subject others’ viewpoints.
Another thing that can happen when you think you’re immune to bias and subjective narratives is that someone who’s even better at critical thinking than you might figure out what your biases and internal narratives are and exploit them to their own advantage. Remember that just because you are learning to use the principles of power, politics, influence, and persuasion on this blog doesn’t mean that others can’t use the very same principles on you. If, for example, you recently made a decision and thought it was your own idea, it might be because someone wanted you to think it was your own idea.
Finally, overestimating what critical thinking alone can accomplish ironically makes you less persuasive. Usually, this takes the form of people thinking that they can rely on their superior logic and reason, qualities of critical thinking, to influence and persuade people. Again, you might indeed be skilled at logic and reason, but to think you can effectively persuade people this way is delusional (just try spending an hour reading some of the arguments on Twitter). The person who thinks they can influence and persuade others through logic and reason alone is the person destined to fail. Effective persuasion requires understanding that people have all kinds of biases and are motivated more by emotionally-driven narratives than logic and reason.
What’s amazing is that all of the above insights are themselves made possible by critical thinking. Just like the scientific method, the true power of critical thinking lies in recognizing its own limitations and pitfalls in yourself as well as in others. You can see now what I mean by the somewhat paradoxical nature of this topic.
So, what should be the takeaway from this? The takeaway is that critical thinking is indeed important for power and influence, but there is a right way to use it and a wrong way to use it. Simply knowing that it’s important and identifying yourself as someone who thinks critically by itself won’t make you more persuasive. Indeed, it can actually make you less persuasive and more vulnerable. So just how can you use critical thinking in a way that maximizes your persuasiveness and minimizes your vulnerability? We’ll cover that in the next article.
Craig Barkacs, professor of business law and ethics in the Master’s in Executive Leadership and MBA Programs at the Knauss School of Business at the University of San Diego.
