27 Sep Are You an Unreflective Thinker? Use These 3 Questions To Find Out
You “think” every second of every minute of every hour of every day of your life. Even when we are not conscious of our thinking we are still thinking. It’s exhausting. What do you know about your own thinking? What do you know about how you think? Do you know how you think? If you don’t have answers to these questions, you may be an unreflective thinker.
the thinking challenge
As students, we are to be taught to focus our thinking on information, ideas, data, facts. The end goal, we are told, is to develop our logical reasoning skills and to become critical thinkers.
Of course, we know such teaching doesn’t always happen and even if it does we don’t all become critical thinkers. Many people are unaware of how their thinking is structured or how to assess or improve it. They’re not aware of how they think, and are ill-equipped to understand how others think. This isn’t wholly a bad thing but it certainly sits at the root of some very power societal issues today.
The Unreflective Thinker
When you are unable / unwilling to assess how you think, to understand how thinking plays out in your life and actions, you may be what critical thinking experts call an “unreflective thinker“.
Unreflective thinkers lack either the skill, knowledge, or both to (a) assess their thinking patterns, and (b) to improve those patterns. They are unaware of how their points of view, assumptions, biases, judgements, concepts, inferences, and basic language expressions become embedded and expressed within their thinking and consequently expressions of their thinking.
Knowing if you are an “unreflective thinker” or not should be a bell toll within any analysis-based profession. If nothing else, analytical work needs to be grounded in neutrality to allow for the consideration of items from a 360 degree perspective.
A basic requirement of being an “analyst” of any kind should be the capacity to analyze, to be analytical. This includes focusing attention on yourself and your thinking.
Without attention to your thinking, bias and opinions will creep and then crawl and then casually stroll into your work.
Without attention, holding the line against other people pushing for their biases and opinions to creep, crawl, and casually stroll into your work is difficult. The result can be to just let it and do what you are told to do. This is antithetical to good analysis.
3 Questions
How do you know if you are an unreflective thinker? Well, here are three questions you can use as often as you need to test and strengthen your critical thinking skills.
- Can you identify a recent situation where you made an assumption and shouldn’t have?
- Do you take on different points of view when thinking through an issue or problem?
- What intellectual standards do you use in your thinking / analytical processes? And, how do you apply them?
Master and Keeper and Creator
Answering these questions is not a “once-and-done” exercise. Return to these questions often because being a critical thinker or an unreflective thinker is not a steady state.
Shifting variables and circumstances factor into and out of your thinking patterns all the time. If you’re not vigilant, these shifts may filter into your work resulting in biased output.
This is the danger of leaving unreflective thinking tendencies unchecked in your analytical work.
Unreflective thinking creates an arena where opinions and judgements become facts. It creates a platform where manipulations of truth and misrepresented facts are accepted and employed to push personal agendas and build professional empires.
Analysts must be vigilant in understanding the impacts and consequences of unreflective thinking on and in our work at all times. Knowing how you think is the first step in this vigilance. The second is understanding how others think.
By navigating these two steps you can consolidate your competencies as the gate master, the gate keeper, and the gate key creator to and for your own work.
Your critical thinking skills are the key to that gate. Use it wisely to lock in, lock out, and lock down.