Critical Thinking: Strategies in Decision Making.
Critical thinking is a way of reacting to information you receive in a way that evaluates the information to determine if you should believe it or not. It is a method of questioning the reasoning, the conclusions, the assumptions, the ambiguities, the personal bias of the writer; all to help you make a determination as to whether the writer has proven his or her point.
Decision making, on the other hand, is the process by which a course of action is decided upon in order to solve a particular problem.
The authors of Critical Thinking: Asking The Right Questions (Browne and Keeley, 2000), describes critical thinking as follows:.
1. Awareness of a set of interrelated critical questions, .
2. Ability to ask and answer critical questions at appropriate times, and .
3. Desire to actively use the critical questions.
The authors of Whatever It Takes: The Realities of Managerial Decision Making (McCall & Kaplan, 1990), describe decision making as follows: "Executive decision making is not a series of single linear acts like baking a pie. It is a process, a sequence of behavior, that stretches back into a murky past and forward into a murkier future. {It is) a turbulent stream rather than an assembly line operation, a twisted, unshapely halting flow" (Dixon, 1976). .
Personally, I believe that critical thinking is the way to gain a greater insight into what, to me, is "the truth". It is a way of questioning the accuracy of the information you receive to better determine if the reasoning behind it is sound. Is it logical? Does it make sense? Has the persuader given enough information to sway me, the persuadee, to his or her point of view? To a great extent, I have found that asking myself why the other person may have a certain bias, or what they have to gain from persuading me to their point of view, is a large component of critical thinking. .
On the other hand, decision making is the process of deciding upon a course of action.
