Cognitive Biases and Groupthink Quiz

Impediments to Critical Thinking: How We Think

• Self-Interested Thinking: Accepting claims because they align with personal desires, goals, or convenience. This is driven by cognitive biases like confirmation bias and motivated reasoning.
• Overcoming Self-Interested Thinking: Actively seek disconfirming evidence and reflect on whether personal interests are influencing judgment.
• Examples of Self-Interested Thinking: Climate change denial by fossil fuel executives, academic overconfidence, and smokers ignoring lung cancer statistics.
• Peer Insight: Self-interested thinking is often accompanied by the sunk-cost fallacy, where a project is continued despite its failing nature due to previous investments.

Group Thinking

• Definition: Conforming to group opinions to avoid conflict, which often results in irrational decisions.
• Key Fallacies: Appeal to popularity ("Millions buy this product, so it must work!") and appeal to tradition ("We've always done it this way").
• Stereotyping: General statements about particular groups (e.g., "All teenagers are irresponsible drivers").
• Historical Examples: The Salem Witch Trials.
• Corporate Examples: The Challenger Space Shuttle disaster
• Peer Insight: Groupthink thrives in hierarchical structures where dissent is discouraged.

Social Media and Peer Influence

• Social Media: Viral misinformation (e.g., 5G causes COVID) amplified by echo chambers.
• Peer Influence: Groupthink is amplified in hierarchical systems where differing opinions are suppressed, further amplified by modern algorithms which often filter opposing viewpoints.

Relativism

• Subjective Relativism: "Truth depends on individual belief."
• Objections: Self-defeating; implies infallibility.
• Examples: Moral debates, health myths, historical revisionism, and varying belief systems regarding different topics.
• Social Relativism: "Truth depends on cultural or societal norms."
• Objections: Contradicts universal principles such as human rights; justifies harmful practices.
• Examples: Cultural traditions like female genital mutilation, dietary norms (eating dogs in some cultures), and legal systems in different societies.
• Peer Insight: Relativism challenges cross-cultural dialogue but can be countered by differentiating between descriptive claims (what is) and normative claims (what ought to be).

Philosophical Skepticism

• Definition: Doubting the possibility of knowledge, questioning perception and evidence.
• Key Arguments: Descartes' Evil Genius (reality is a simulated experience) and the Matrix Hypothesis (reality may be a simulation); questioning truth claims and the validity of knowledge acquisition based on sensory input.
• Objections: Pragmatic response (absolute certainty is not required for practical knowledge), and the Scientific Method, which assumes observable reality plays a key role in the process of knowledge acquisition.
• Examples: Questioning the Earth's round shape, denying well-documented historic events, or arguing for the existence of extraterrestrial conspiracies.
• Peer Insight: Moderate skepticism is valuable for critical evaluation, but radical skepticism can paralyze decision-making.

Propositional Knowledge

• Three Pillars: Belief (mental acceptance), Truth (correspondence with reality), and Justification (evidence or rationale).
• Gettier Problems: Illustrate how justified true belief isn't necessarily knowledge if it's based on luck.
• Peer Insight: Reliability is key to knowledge; it combats luck-based belief systems.

Course Assumptions and Strategies

• Assumptions: Objective truths exist, and knowledge is attainable via justified true belief.
• Study Strategies: Apply concepts to news/speeches, debate relativism (using examples), challenge skepticism (using vaccines as a case study), and use the SEEC method (State, Explain, Example, and Conclude) when structuring arguments.

Types of Reasoning

• Deductive Reasoning: Moves from general premises to a specific conclusion. Validity refers to how the conclusion logically follows the premises, while soundness implies truth, to both the premises and conclusion, resulting in a valid argument.

• Inductive Reasoning: Moves from specific observations to a general conclusion (conclusion is probable given premises).

• Key takeaway on Inductive Reasoning: Strength refers to the probability of the conclusion being true, whereas Cogency refers to both the premises and the conclusion's overall validity.

• Inductive Fallacies: A false premise will lead to a false conclusion. A strength in inductive reasoning is its premise validity when it comes to the generalizing process, otherwise, the conclusion of the argument can still be false in the context of the argument's overall validity. Relativism can hinder deductive reasoning due to the subjective interpretations that make impossible to validate premises.