Pathological Thinkers?

This is the best article I have read in years that explains quite a bit of what is going on with our youth and young adults who turn into older adults.

The article was published in the Atlantic magazine and titled “The Coddling of the American Mind.”   The article argues that our universities and colleges are turning our students into “pathological thinkers” who reason based on fallacies and emotions rather than sound logic.

Does that not sound like what is happening today?  So many people are making decisions today via emotional instead of intellectual reasoning.

The article was co-written by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, the president of the civil liberties group Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

You need to read the entire article, it is very very enlightening.  Please click on the hotlinks I have provided in this blog.

Traditionally, the two authors tell us our colleges and universities trained students in how to think rather than what to think. They mention the Socratic Method, where they say “learning is encouraged through the use of incisive questions that force students to reconsider, defend, and if necessary change their own core beliefs and assumptions.”

Sounds partly like a definition for critical thinking, something we have lost.

The authors then inform us that today colleges and universities our not , I repeat not encouraging logical and clear-headed reasoning, instead they are “increasingly encouraging a host of reasoning fallacies and cognitive disorders that are making them worse rather than better thinkers.”

The call this “emotional reasoning” from the article we find the following:

"[David] Burns defines emotional reasoning as assuming “that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: ‘I feel it, therefore it must be true.’ ” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as letting “your feelings guide your interpretation of reality.” But, of course, subjective feelings are not always trustworthy guides; unrestrained, they can cause people to lash out at others who have done nothing wrong. Therapy often involves talking yourself down from the idea that each of your emotional responses represents something true or important.

 

Emotional reasoning dominates many campus debates and discussions. A claim that someone’s words are “offensive” is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feeling of offendedness. It is, rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something objectively wrong. It is a demand that the speaker apologize or be punished by some authority for committing an offense."

As I stated above this is the best piece I have read that helps us understand why so many people choose politicians and policies that will ultimately hurt them.

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Or please feel free to start a discussion and write your thoughts in the comment section.