sample-lesson

Welcome to the first lesson on Critical Thinking 101. This would be a live class where the instructor will help you understand why everyone must think critically.

If you’re curious about how this class is going to pan out, please do read on.

An Exercise to start off (10 minutes)

Let’s start this lesson off with a series of questions. They are courtesy of Daniel Kahnemann and his seminal book Thinking Fast and Slow. Please try to answer the questions with the first answer that pops into your mind. In other words, think and answer fast!

Question 1:

Consider the letter K. Is K more likely to appear as the first letter in a word or as the third letter?

Question 2:

Politicians are more likely to be involved in extra-marital affairs than are doctors or lawyers. True or false?

Question 3:

“Steve from India is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure and a passion for detail.” Is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?

Did you answer as follows?

Question 1 - The first letter

Question 2 - True

Question 3 - Librarian

Then, here are some facts for you to consider.

Question 1 - It’s easier to think up words starting with the letter K than words having K as the third letter, when in fact it appears more in the third position.

Question 2 - Extra-marital affairs of politicians are more likely to be reported in the media than those of doctors or lawyers. Thus, we remember instances of politicians more often than those of people in other professions. This doesn’t mean that politicians are statistically more likely to have affairs.

Question 3 - There are almost 150 million farmers in India. That’s almost 10% of India’s population. Not to forget - India is still an agricultural country. There is no way there are those many librarians who exist in our country. While the description of Steve fits the typical description of a librarian, he is statistically more likely to be a farmer in India.

This is an example of what we call a stereotype.

So, what happened?

If you got the answers to the questions wrong (as illustrated above), not to worry! Most people get these wrong. That’s because we answer such questions with intuition without fully reasoning things out. In other words (or in the words of the great Daniel Kahnemann, we think fast and not slow). Our human mind is subject to many such Thinking errors, which cause us to make the wrong decisions in life.

This is where Critical Thinking as a skill and a course comes in - to help you avoid such thinking errors and make the right decisions in life.

So, what is Critical Thinking? (10 minutes)

Here’s a good video to break it down

A quick summary

In this part of the class, the instructor will request you to summarize what Critical Thinking is, according to the video we just saw. Please feel free to participate.

Here’s a quick summary of Critical Thinking for you to verify your version.

• Doubting the truth of things (Skepticism)
• Seeing something from a neutral point of view (Objectivity)
• Explaining why we believe something to be true (Reasoning)
• Changing our minds when facts change (Open-mindedness)

Exercise

Before we move forward, here’s a quick exercise. We discussed stereotypes in the early part of the lesson when we discussed the curious case of Steve. Can you think of at least 5 stereotypical beliefs that you/ people you have seen have held?

This will be a discussion that the instructor will facilitate in the class.

Done with the exercise?

If you think hard, you would have debunked your stereotypes by applying Skepticism, Objectivity, Reason, and Open-Mindedness - four tenets of Critical Thinking that we saw in our video.

And if you’re interested to know more about stereotypes, here’s a great video.

How does our brain like to think? (10 minutes)

So, why is our brain prone to so many thinking errors? Let’s find out from this section.

Exercise

Which of the following statements is correct?

1. The yolk of the egg is white.
2. The yolk of the egg are white.

Please take a quick moment to answer this.

When you saw this question, you might have -

1. Thought up grammatical rules to choose A or B (OR)
2. Googled the question

Whichever you did - you missed a trick. Neither A nor B is correct. Egg yolks are never white - they are almost always yellow in colour!

So, what happened?

Let’s understand why some of us would have got the wrong answer.

The human brain is designed to expend the least amount of energy possible. This leads us to make choices that are most often wrong.

Thinking is, in fact, a complex process that requires a lot of energy. In a resting state, the brain consumes 20% of the body’s energy!

In the question given above, it was easy for your brain to choose between one of the two given choices (lesser energy consumed) as compared to evaluating if that was a trick question!

Let’s try another exercise.

Exercise

Can you solve these as quickly as you can?

1. 2 X 4
2. 10 X 20
3. 13 X 2
4. 33 X 48

So, what happened?

Did you slow down when you hit 33 X 48? You slowed down and had to maybe take a pen & paper to calculate. That process would have consumed a lot of your brain’s resources. The human brain, by design, is created to avoid expending this kind of energy. This is precisely why a lot of us hate hard math problems!

Understanding this flaw of the brain and training it to make the right decisions is what Critical Thinking (and this course) is about.

How does a lack of Critical Thinking affect us? (20 minutes)

Now that we know what Critical Thinking is and how our brain thinks, let’s discuss how lack of Critical Thinking can affect us.

Exercise

Here’s a question for you to answer - really quickly - without googling.

The tongue has 4 different zones to measure the four basic tastes - bitterness, sourness, saltiness, and sweetness. True or false?

A lot of science textbooks would say ‘True’, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Here’s why this is False!

Fake News and Misleading Statistics

Lack of Critical Thinking is why fake news travels really fast!

It’s also why statistics can be misleading at times!

Exercise

Now that you know that you can believe all of the wrong things if you do not apply Critical Thinking, here’s an exercise. Think of 5 things you believed to be true - but later found out to be false since you didn’t question them deep enough the first time.

The instructor will facilitate this discussion in class.

Oh, and when you finish your list, here’s a list of the most common misconceptions the world believed to be true - until they were debunked. How many of these did you believe to be true?

Summary

In summary, it’s pretty certain that all of us -

1. Want to make the right decisions in life
2. Want not to be fooled by events and people around us

So, let’s learn to apply Critical Thinking ruthlessly. And how do you do that? Apply the following to everything you see and hear around you -

• Skepticism
• Objectivity
• Reasoning
• Open-mindedness

A question to ponder before you leave

And, before we part, let’s see if you can apply Critical Thinking to answer the following question.

Question -

Look at the map of the world shown below. Which is bigger - Africa or Greenland?

Answer - Once you’ve done your own self-reflection and investigation to answer, please feel free to check your answer against this.