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Teaching Critical Thinking About Difficult Topics
Listening to the arguments presented certainly provides evidence of poor reasoning.
However, recent work in social psychology suggests that touching on moral issues may
provoke a predictable set of responses from students that underlies this phenomenon
(see subsections “How moral values interfere with critical thinking” and “Motivated
irrationality” below).
Morality, in Brief
Moral values are perceived to be universal and obligatory (Turiel, 1983). That is, there is
no choice in whether one obeys a moral standard; to violate it is wrong, in the mind of the
perceiver, regardless of the actor’s culture or circumstances. Moreover, moral values carry
with them an affective consequence for violation—an implicit feeling of wrongness
(Gibbard, 1990; Rokeach, 1973). These values are not simply choices or social conventions,
but rules that contain an implicit directive that all people, everywhere, ought to behave in
this way.
In addition, a moral value has an interpersonal focus by definition (Rokeach, 1973), so
if, as we argue here, moral values interfere with critical thinking, we should see more of
this problem in the social sciences than the physical sciences. That is, a student may argue
about whether an object dropped from an airplane at altitude falls straight down or not,
but is unlikely to get enraged about whether it ought to do so.
It has long been assumed that moral decisions are based on deliberate reasoning, and
increase in sophistication along with general cognitive development (e.g., Kohlberg,
1981). In this model, a person considers the situation, applies the relevant moral rule, and
comes to a judgment of whether an action is acceptable or not. And if people do reason in
a rational way about moral issues, it should then be possible to address moral questions
through evidence and logic. It should be possible to overcome any initial resistance to an
argument by an instructor’s calm and careful presentation, assuming that students have
reached a reasonable level of cognitive development. In practice, however, these possibilities
are not always realized.
How Moral Values Interfere with Critical Thinking
Recent research suggests that many moral judgments may not be nearly as rational as
traditional models suggest. For instance, Haidt (2001) proposed that moral issues are
predominantly informed by affective response, and that any reasoning that occurs takes
place after the judgment is made. If Haidt is correct, once students have made their initial,
“gut-level” judgments about a topic, they are very unlikely to change their minds in
response to factual information. In the case of overwhelming contrary evidence, students
will still manage to maintain initial views through selective attention and biased reasoning.
This process will look very similar to poor critical thinking that is rooted in other causes,
such as a lack of understanding of the evidence. However, if the students have made
emotional moral judgments about the topic, providing more evidence will not be effective
in promoting critical thinking.