Why Humans Suck At Critical Thinking
And how you can improve your objective reasoning skills
Critical thinking is commonly defined as the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments in order to form a judgment by the application of rational, skeptical, and unbiased analyses and evaluation¹.
It’s a fundamental life skill when it comes to solving problems and making objective judgments or choices that may have a widespread impact on many lives, such as in politics, business, or social relationships.
In this article, we’ll first analyze why humans are generally bad at critical thinking and objective reasoning, and then discuss some techniques to avoid common biases.
How thinking works
To understand why it’s hard to make unbiased choices, let’s first take a look at a simplified high-level model of the human thinking process. The human thinker can be modeled as an information-processing machine that holds an internal state.
This high-level model is composed of three main steps: input, processing, and output. The input can be thought of as what triggers a thought. It may be an external or…
