Global Courant 2023-05-15 05:36:00
Does critical thinking require a democratic society? A new study suggests so, especially in the first 25 years of a person’s life – a window of ‘developmental thinking’ shaped by political, social and economic factors.
The study comes from an international team of researchers from UCLA, Romania and Israel who sought to determine how society might influence an individual’s ability to weigh and evaluate presented “facts.”
“Whether we follow different news sources or scroll through a busy Twitter feed, we constantly encounter different points of view on topics ranging from politics to movies,” said one of the study’s authors, Amalia Ionescu, a psychology doctoral student at UCLA, in A press release. “Some of these topics carry infinite weight over others, but ultimately we use the same kind of mechanism to decide how to understand conflicting viewpoints.”
The ability to oppose viewpoints and avoid absolutist thinking, researchers say, is closely linked to one’s access to information, education and technology — all resources that democratic societies prioritize.
By surveying respondents from Romania, a country under an authoritarian regime from 1965 to 1989, researchers identified important differences in “truth” evaluations between different age groups.
This was done by assessing three cohorts of Romanians: those born after the democratic revolution (ages 18 to 30), those who lived their late adolescence and early stages of adulthood under the authoritarian regime (ages 45 to 59), and those who have spent at least 45 years under an authoritarian regime (75 and older). The three groups of respondents were presented with a series of written scenarios in which two characters had conflicting views, and then asked to rate which view was the most ‘true’.
The findings, which were published in the journal PLOS One, showed that those who adapted to a democratic society later in adult life (age 45 and older) were more likely to think absolutistically about these open-minded scenarios. end than those who transitioned to a democratic society at a younger age. Younger Romanians were therefore better able to consider opposing viewpoints and perform critical analyses.
Raluca Furdui, a master’s student at Romania West University of Timisoara, attributes these differences to factors such as censorship and education.
“For most of their lives (Romanians aged 75 and older) had only one TV program to watch, and all books, news, movies and music were under communist censorship,” she said in the press release. “They learned to respect the authority of the teachers in schools, and some never even had the chance to go to high school.”
“In contrast,” Furdui added, “we, the youngest generation in our study — currently between 18 and 30 — were challenged by our teachers to speak up, think critically, and check information.”
The researchers found that evaluation—a reasoning that relies on logic and evidence—was most common among people with the highest levels of education. Increases in absolutism – which causes people to think black and white – were correlated with lower levels of education and social media use.
Patricia Greenfield, a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA, says the social environment conducive to a democratic society leads people to “give up the assumption that there is one correct answer and evaluate multiple possibilities.”
“We found that there is indeed a sensitive developmental period for learning cultural ways of thinking.”
While democratic societies are crucial to fostering critical thinking, they certainly don’t guarantee it. According to the authors of this study, an overabundance of personal opinion, a result of social media, along with authoritative rejection of the truth, such as political outcry of “fake news,” can push evaluative thinking in the opposite direction — toward absolutist thinking and authoritarian thinking. politics.
“Along with the rise of the internet and social media, there has been an increase in the importance of personal opinion in the United States, along with a decrease in the importance of agreed facts,” Greenfield said.
Study co-author Michael Weinstock, an associate professor of education at Israel’s Ben Gurion University of the Negev, said in the press release that changes in democratic values can reverse people’s ability to think critically about presented facts.
“Based on our research, one would predict that the opposite change in the environment — toward more authoritarianism — would lead to the opposite direction of change toward more absolutist thinking.”
The study pointed out that authoritarian changes were taking place in the US under the Trump administration, and such shifts, which have recently occurred in other countries around the world, may weaken people’s ability to rationally consider information.
