Types of Thinking
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Types of Thinking

S. Ian Robertson

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eBook - ePub

Types of Thinking

S. Ian Robertson

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About This Book

Types of Thinking provides a basic grounding in the psychology of thinking for undergraduate students with little previous knowledge of cognitive psychology. This clear, well-structured overview explores the practical aspects and applications of everyday thinking, creative thinking, logical and scientific thinking, intelligent thinking and machine thinking. It also explores 'failures of thinking', the biases and shortcuts that sometimes lead our thinking astray.
The author tackles big ideas in an accessible manner and in an entertaining style, ensuring that Types of Thinking will be attractive not only to students but also to teachers organising and planning courses, as well as the lay reader.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781134691531

Chapter 1

What does ‘thinking’ mean?

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What is thinking?
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The world in our heads
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The limits to thinking
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Rational thinking
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Surface thinking and deep thinking
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Summary
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death.
Bertrand Russell,
Education: Selected Papers
There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labour of thinking.
Thomas A. Edison

What is thinking?

THINKING, LIKE ITS RELATED CONCEPTS ‘intelligence’ and ‘consciousness’, is something we are all intimately familiar with; and, just like intelligence and consciousness, it can be hard to define. The two quotations with which this chapter begins emphasise the effortful nature of some of our thinking and the fact that we don’t particularly like to put in such effort if we can help it; nevertheless, if our lives depended on it I’m sure we could, despite what Bertrand Russell says – and, in any case, we avoid the ‘real labour of thinking’ because it is often a perfectly sensible thing to do. If you come face to face with a large animal with stripes and large teeth and claws, you might deduce that it is a predator. From its size you deduce that it probably preys on animals larger than you. You therefore infer that you belong to the category of prey. Since it is watching you, you deduce that it might be thinking the same thing. In such situations standing thinking is probably the last thing you want to do. Just as the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, so the quickest way to solve a problem or make a decision is often to rely on pre-packaged procedures or mental short cuts wherever possible that allow us to get things done relatively effortlessly. If you are faced with a predator a simple general rule that says ‘if you see an animal bigger than you with sharp teeth, then run’, is more likely to keep you alive than effortful thinking.
Doing logic puzzles, solving geometry problems, translating passages of English into French, finding ways of bringing peace to trouble-torn parts of the world, trying to remove a rusted bolt from an awkward place under a car, all involve a degree of effortful thinking. Some problems are effortful because they are not naturally occurring. The environmental pressures that existed on the grasslands of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago were not ones that selected for our ability to write books, or work in the accountants departments of offices, or drive trucks, or do paper and pencil tests in thermodynamics. They did evolve to allow us to make plans and inferences when hunting and foraging, to understand and take part in complex social interaction, to recognise objects, faces and dangerous situations, to identify anyone who isn’t from our tribe, and so on.
Different problems require different types of thinking. In general, we don’t deal with unfamiliar problems in the same way we deal with familiar ones. Not only that but people vary in the ways they prefer to think about things. Some like doing crossword puzzles while others like making the crossword puzzles up. Some like problems where there is a definite answer whereas others like problems where there is no one right answer. Some like diagnosing what is wrong with a computer when it crashes, others like designing buildings.
We face a variety of problems daily and deal with them in a variety of ways. The aim of this book is to categorise the types of thinking we use to cope with familiar and unfamiliar situations. Much of the time it deals with the techniques we use to avoid the real labour of thinking. It also deals with the reasons why we avoid effortful thinking where we can (some of the most important ones are introduced in this chapter).
Throughout this book a number of concepts keep cropping up that are important to an understanding of thinking and its limitations. A distinction we can begin to make is between the kind of everyday thinking and problem solving that we engage in and the free-floating undirected thinking involved in dreaming. Freud (1954) referred to two types of thinking: primary process thinking and secondary process thinking. Primary process thinking is the type governed by our instinctual drives (the id). It manifests itself mainly in dreams and daydreams where our deep rooted wishes are fulfilled. Secondary process thinking is the everyday problem solving we engage in. This too acts to fulfil our innate desires for food, sex, security, and so on, but operates within the constraints of the real world – which means that we can’t always get what we want when we want it. You can’t indulge your craving for a bar of chocolate when you are half way up a mountain and haven’t brought any chocolate with you, nor is it acceptable to steal it. This book deals with the second of these two general types of thinking – the goal directed, everyday kind (for more on this distinction and on undirected thinking in particular see Gilhooly, 1996). Thinking involves a goal that has to be obtained, whether this be a dinner, a completed crossword puzzle, a medical diagnosis, or balancing a national budget. Effortful thinking is necessary when this goal is not immediately attainable and its solution is not obvious. Thinking is usually effortless when you know what to do to attain your goal.

The world in our heads

Spend a few moments thinking about what you would do if you came out of work one evening and found that your car was no longer where you left it. You may have imagined several courses of action and their possible outcomes. Your understanding of the situation and your response to it, though, are inside your head. The reason why we can make plans and predictions, achieve complex goals, and solve problems is because we can carry out a sequence of actions in our heads before carrying out any actions in the real world. To do that we must have a representation of the world that we can manipulate in our minds.
If I say to myself, ‘There are some pretty dark clouds over there and I have to walk to the station. I’d better take an umbrella.’ I am using current information (dark clouds) and relating it to current intentions and past knowledge and experience stored in long-term memory (I have to walk to the station; dark clouds often mean rain; rain makes me wet; carrying an umbrella prevents me from getting wet). Thinking therefore involves manipulating mental representations of the world and prevents us from making mistakes. This is an extremely useful ability.
Creating and manipulating a mental representation involves manipulating or processing information. Reading the word BREAD involves picking out the lines and curves of the letters, sticking them together to form letters, recognising letters, recognising the word, converting the written letters or groups of letters into sounds, accessing the word’s pronunciation. Each stage involves some kind of processing of the information produced at the earlier stage to build up to the final pronunciation. These stages don’t necessarily occur one after the other. They could be operating in parallel at almost the same time (see Chapter 6). The simplest activity such as reading this sentence out loud requires a vast amount of extremely fast, automatic processes that are not under conscious control. You can’t stop yourself from understanding the word BREAD. You recognise it as a real word; know what it sounds like; you know what it means; you know it is commonly associated with the word BUTTER. At its most basic level, then, thinking is information processing.

The limits to thinking

An operation such as multiplying 2 x 3 in your head does not involve much processing. In fact you probably retrieve the answer as a fact straight from long-term memory. Multiplying 378 by 463 in your head is different. You probably don’t have the answer stored in long-term memory for a start, so it becomes the kind of problem you have to think about. You need to access relevant bits of information from memory, including the relevant method for doing this kind of problem, and break the problem down into manageable sub-problems. You need to access the results of multiplying 8 by 3 and what to do with the 2 and 4 and so on. It is hard to keep all the information from earlier stages of problem solving in your mind without writing it down. The mental workspace that does the multiplying, temporarily stores the answers you get, and accesses the relevant bits of information from long-term memory, is known as working memory (Baddeley, 1986, 1997). Solving problems therefore involves storage and rehearsal of information as well as processing bits of information in working memory, which is in turn made more or less difficult (uses up more or less processing capacity) depending on the knowledge of the solver (Just, Carpenter and Hemphill, 1996; Kyllonen and Christal, 1990). Our thinking is limited because the capacity to store and process information is limited. The short-term store has a capacity of about seven bits or ‘chunks’ of information (Miller, 1956) although Simon (1974) puts it at around five chunks, but this gets smaller the more work we have to do to that information. Thinking gets more effortful as we push working memory to its limits and errors can occur when it is overloaded.

Rational thinking

We would like to think of ourselves as rational beings. When we look around at what we do to each other and the environment, or at arguments between groups of people to which we do not belong, our thinking does not look all that rational. Part of the confusion is that ‘rational’ has two meanings. The first is synonymous with logical thinking. Rational thinking is what you do when you are thinking logically. The second meaning refers to the extent to which our thinking is related to our goals. Whenever we try to get what we want in the easiest possible way we know how, then we are acting rationally. To be more precise: if we weren’t limited in our capacity to store and process information temporarily, if we could access all the relevant information from our long-term memory when we needed it, if we were aware of our prior beliefs and attitudes and their effect on our thinking, if we were aware of our own best interests, and if we could do all that in pursuit of our goals then we would be thinking rationally. Unfortunately, as you may have learned from bitter experience, our ability to do those things is limited. As a result our rationality is bounded (Simon, 1983). It has its limits. Those limits have already been discussed as they are the limits in our capacity to process information and retrieve it when we need it.
As a result of processing limits we don’t have the capacity and don’t have the time to identify and process all the information relevant to a problem. If we are looking for a decent restaurant that’s not too dear, we don’t tend to go around comparing all the menus and all the prices of all the restaurants in a two-mile radius. Instead, we have certain criteria and the first restaurant we come to that meets those criteria is likely to be the one we choose. This is known as satisficing (Simon, 1956), a blend of satisfying and sufficing. The first restaurant, solution, man, woman, bus that comes along that satisfies some basic minimum criteria suffices.

Surface thinking and deep thinking

The human understanding is most excited by that which strikes and enters the mind at once and suddenly, and by which the imagination is immediately filled and inflated. It then begins almost imperceptibly to conceive and suppose that everything is similar to the few objects which have taken possession of the mind.
(Francis Bacon, Novum Organum)
Several centuries ago Francis Bacon realised that there were two important influences on our thinking: salience and similarity. We have evolved to take particular note of the salient features of our environment; we notice whatever stands out. In trying to understand an unfamiliar situation or problem we latch onto the aspects that seem to stand out. Unfortunately, what appears to be salient may not in fact be relevant and one’s thinking can be ‘led up the garden path’. This simple but wide-reaching fact can account for the errors students make when learning...

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