How to Think Critically With Socratic Questioning
The key is questioning your attitudes
I know you won’t believe me, but the highest form of human excellence is to question oneself and others.
-Socrates
We as humans go through life being curious about our surroundings, we observe events, take lessons, and form beliefs from those events.
What none of us often do is question our reasoning.
· Why did we think of an event that way?
· Could it be thought differently?
· Could someone look at this event differently?
These questions hold the key to a better understanding of your thought patterns.
Questioning our reasoning allows us to optimize the most important decision maker’s(ourselves) decisions.
This type of open-ended probing question is an important part of cognitive behavioral therapy and holds the key to understanding the meanings in your thoughts.
Socratic questioning involves guiding a person through their thinking patterns, with the help of these open-ended probing questions, to eventually help them detect the contradictions they might have in their beliefs and thinking.
First, the therapist invites the person to reflect on his thoughts by asking open-ended questions about his beliefs and reasoning.
Each question is asked with genuine curiosity and without judgment.
These questions are useful for exploring the justification of claims we make and realizing any illogical reasonings we make.
Finally, the person is encouraged to think about alternative perspectives.
Benefits
Studies suggest Socratic questioning supports critical thinking in children and was shown to be a useful tool for treating depression in therapy.
Applying the Socratic questioning to our introspection could be a great way to understand our thinking patterns and be better critical thinkers ourselves.
Here are some questions you can apply to understand your thinking patterns better and improve your critical thinking.
Example Case:
Let’s say somebody on the street crashed into you and walked away without saying sorry.
You exclaimed: “Oh, why does everybody hate me?”
Let’s apply Socratic questioning to this belief:
What assumptions am I making?
We can assume many terrible things about that person, but the truth is, we don’t know anything about his life, who he is, and what happened to him.
“That person must’ve hated me.” could be an automatic response but aren’t we just assuming it and don’t know what he is thinking?
He could be angry at something else, he could’ve just lost his job or just learned that a loved one has cancer.
We have no evidence for that assumption and we should focus on the evidence for unbiased thinking.
Does this belief apply to other contexts?
Do you believe others hate you in other contexts? Do you have evidence that others treated you poorly because they didn’t like you?
We could argue that for a regular person, it’s pretty unrealistic to be hated by everyone. Most people feel indifference to us, just as we feel the same to them.
How can we look at this differently? Could there be a different explanation?
Through our daily lives, we don’t stop to think about alternative reasons for events. And for a good reason, it’s very efficient.
However, questioning the beliefs and assumptions that cause rumination can help us ease the stress caused by rumination.
In our example, that guy who crashed into you could be in a hurry to reach to hospital to be with his wife in labor.
Knowing this would probably make you more empathetic to him.
Thinking about alternative explanations could help broaden our perspective in many cases.
What is the evidence for that?
What are the pieces of evidence for the belief that everybody hates you? You could argue that the guy crashing into you did that because he hated you.
Well, we don’t know whether he did that because of the dislike he feels for you or another reason. There is no evidence for that.
Looking back at the evidence you would maybe notice that people weren’t very rude to you all the time and this might be an isolated incident in your day.
This would help you avoid rumination and feel better about yourself.
Socratic questioning could inspire us to ask fruitful questions about our beliefs and attitudes and transform them into healthier ones.
With healthier beliefs and attitudes, we open up a gateway of opportunities to grow and be a better version of ourselves, so make sure to question your attitudes towards life once in a while.
I would like to finish this article with one of my favorite quotes that might inspire you.
It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
-Epictetus
