Everyday in our lives we use critical thinking skills and our perspectives to help us assess and handle situations carefully. Throughout my life I have been granted experiences that have helped me become a more logical, openminded, communicative thinker. My experience while in Honduras helped me strengthen my thinking skill of not making assumptions and jumping to conclusions and my experience with prejudices, stereotypes, and labeling helped me become better at communicating and handling my situations carefully. An experience that changed and also shaped my thinking of the worlds view was when my grandparents took me on a cruise at a young age to Honduras. Before the cruise, I had spent numerous hours searching the Internet viewing images …show more content…
Throughout my life I have had many run ins with people that have created a prejudgment of me and accused me of things based upon my skin color or they have made comments towards me that were very stereotypical. For example, when I was fifteen years old I entered a store with a hooded sweatshirt on because the weather outside was very frigid. Upon entering the store I realized that the store clerk had taken exceptional notice to me and that she had began to follow me around the store from aisle to aisle. Finally I had enough and I asked her why she had been following me and she told me that she wanted to make sure that I wasn 't stealing anything. The fact that she bluntly told me, infuriated me and I began to yell and she threatened to call the police if I didn 't get out of the store. Once she said that I looked around at my surroundings and saw that there were children in the store and their looks of fear with their eyes locked upon me as if i were a monster. When people make these comments or stereotype because of my gender, race, age and other variables it really does take a toll on me in a sense that it makes me act irrationally and make decisions that could negatively impact my life. As a critical thinker you are supposed to assess situations carefully and communicate with others to solve problems but instead I would become angry and
The article, “Critical Thinking? You Need Knowledge” by Diane Ravitch, discusses how in the past people have been deprived from the thinking process and abstract thinking skills. Students need to be given more retainable knowledge by their teachers to improve their critical thinking skills. (Ravitch).
In my opinion stereotyping has become like a superstition. Children these days pick up subtle cues from their mothers and use them in the form of stereotypes. Children and parents don’t realize that they are mistaken by falsified beliefs. In my opinion it is not worthy for a person to quickly correlate positive and negative terms with black and white faces or by race. One particular race might get teased with nicknames like rude and disrespectful. Various nationalities are stereotyped as friendly or unfriendly. These situations arise stereotype threat. In this situation s/he has the fear of doing something that would accidently confirm a negative stereotype. Even if the person does not believe the stereotype s/he may experience threat. People find very disturbing to accept stereotypes, they have pain of being treated unfairly. I opine that people perform poorly when they feel they are being stereotyped. They face obscurity in making rational decisions. Stereotype people also build in aggressive action towards others. Thus stereotyping should be controlled and those who are being stereotyped should have different
Throughout my life I have only had one person judge my family and I based on our skin color. I come from a Mexican background, and an example of racism that comes our way is that people assume all Mexicans are gardeners. One day my father had his brother come over and when my uncle made too much noise we were approached by a white woman who then yelled at my father, “tell your gardener to keep it down!’’ Although people can argue the case that it was just a simple mistake, it really wasn’t, we were the only family in the neighborhood that were not of the same “color’’ as they were and we have been
Assume you’re walking down a street and everywhere you turn you encounter pitch black darkness. You reach a point where you only have two choices; either you go left where there is a group of tattooed muscular black men or you go right where you find a group of well dressed white men. What would you do? Your immediate choice would be to stay clear from the group of black men and that you’d be better off going to the right. What just happened here was that you assumed a certain group of human beings is more likely to cause you harm than the other. From a very young age we start to categorize things in to different groups. We see pencils, pens, erasers and we categorize them in a group and call them ‘stationery’. Similarly we tend to categorize human beings in to different groups and associate certain behaviors or traits with these groups. We have this urge to categorize because it makes us ‘cognitively effective’. When we categorize, we no longer need to consider information about each member of the group; we assume that what holds true for some members must also be true for other members of the group. The act of categorizing human beings is known as stereotyping. The word stereotype has Greek roots; ‘stereos’ meaning firm and ‘typos’ meaning impression hence, ‘Firm Impression’. The word itself implies that we associate certain ‘impressions’ with a group and hold these impressions to be true for most if not each member of the group. Although many leading sociologists and psychologists will have us believe that stereotypes are firmly grounded in reality, the truth is stereotypes exist only because we allow them to; we cause their existence and ultimately perpetuate them because in reality stereotypes are nothing but mere logical fal...
Predjudice and Discrimination as a Part of Our Cognitive Social Being Prejudice and Discrimination are an all to common part of our cognitive social being, but many social psychologists believe that it can be stopped, but only with the help of social conditioning. In this writing I hope to explain and point out some key terms and points made in my assigned chapter. Prejudice refers to a special type of attitude, usually something negative toward any group or ethnicity that is not of one's own social class. Attitude plays a very important role in ones cognitive framework, in that it forces our minds to process information on certain social groups differently making a cognitive earmark for that individual group (stereotypes).
In the text, Diane Halpern argues there are ways we can increase our critical thinking skills, she proves this by providing credible areas of research. The first area of research Halpern provides is the results from the thinking skills program in Venezuela. The program tested two groups of students, one experimental and one control group. The experimental group was involved in a thinking skills class, whilst the control group had no such instruction. The results were that the experimental group had notable gains in answering questions which required thinking critically. This
I still need to learn how to stop judging people by how they look. I don’t mean that I judge people by their skin color, but by how they dress and what kind of cloths they are in. Everyone should wear what they feel good in, wear what they want to without anyone telling them they shouldn’t. I would like to be more open minded, but it doesn’t help that my mother makes those comments all the time about how someone is dressed. Race plays more of a role in my life than I would like it to. I am a white female, so I am seen as both privileged and oppressed, privileged because I am white, oppressed because I am a woman. I want to break my chains of oppression, break the chains of privilege, I want to be defined by who I am, not by what I look like or what gender I
Critical thinking occurs in everyday life. As humans, we think critically about everything we see, hear,
I think it is outrageously unfair that I have taken the time and money to get an Associates and Bachelor’s Degree, but can’t even work in my field most times because my name comes across to jobs on a resume, before I can even meet them or get the chance to interview. I’m not saying that this occurs every time, but I strongly believe that it happens most times. I’m also not assuming that this stereotypes only occur with the opposite race, but believes that it also occurs with my own race. With that being said, although I have these feelings, I’m not at all innocent from treating, feeling, or believing the same about my own race along with other races/cultures. In the past, I’ve made statements to individuals about not wanting to talk to other cultures, like Hispanics, on the phone while trying to handle business because I couldn’t understand their accent. Was it a hurtful thing to say? Yes, it was. I’ve also made jokes about Mexican families being “packed in small cars” and going in grocery stores to buy up all of the salsa, lettuce, tomatoes, and taco shells. Was that belittling and judgmental? Yes, it was. I have made fun of Asians and their language while paying for their service,
Prejudices shape our perceptions of various people and influence our attitudes and actions toward particular groups and prejudicial attitudes that are negative often lead to hostile relations between domi...
Has anyone ever assumed anything of you? How about your occupation? What you’d like to be when you grow up? Being a different race in America comes with a big cluster of problems. Some examples are things you’ll see in the news. Maybe even things you hear about in public, whether they’re rumors or facts. Sometimes the news is good or sometimes bad. But sometimes, people have a way of matching two different events and scapegoating everyone of a certain race for it. But you probably know what I’m talking about. It may even have happened to you. I’ve been subjected to this too, to a minor issue called racism. I’d like to share a few personal things about me and a story of when I was young, when I first learned and experienced what a problem racism could be.
People often look at others and judge them based on their appearance. It is something everyone does based on human nature, but nobody knows what that person 's story it. Maybe that lady is dressed in ratty clothes because she works two jobs to support her family. People base these judgments on race, sex, and economic class. I often feel misjudged by people and it is hard because people do not know my real story. On the exterior, I look like a middle class white male and that is what I am, but I am much more than that. Nobody would see me and know that I am a Latino and guess how I got to where I am today. Everybody has a different background and everybody has created their own personal history different from the rest of the
A second example is when I see someone using food stamps, and they are of a different race than myself I assume they are just using the Government, and taking advantage of the money earned by hard working individuals. The reason these individuals use food stamps could be they lost their jobs, and have no money to buy food and need help to get through this tough stage in their lives. Also, I tend to repeatedly make prejudice opinions/judgments about certain friends of mine on Facebook. When they post a status about something going on in their lives; I automatically assume they think their lives are more important than anyone else’s and that we want to hear all about it. I need to realize that by using these prejudice opinions/judgments toward others not only affects the person I place my judgments and opinions upon, but those prejudice actions affect myself because people see my wrongful opinions and not my caring personality. I can alter my behavior and enhance my interpersonal interactions by becoming more knowledgeable, motivated, and skilled. I can develop more knowledge about a person by asking questions and establishing
What is not easily recognized is the fact that the very fabric of life is dependent on the ability to think properly and make good decisions. Improper thinking is costly in the quality of life and monetarily. The result of a critical thinker that has worked to cultivate proper thinking skills includes: the ability to ask vital questions and to identify problems with clarity. A critical thinker also collects relevant information while effectively interpreting it, thinks with an open mind, uses alternative systems of thought, and understands how to communicate while working to formulate a strong solution. In summary, critical thinking is self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking. Above all else, the standards of excellence are rigorous, and it entails the prospect of overcoming the challenge of sociocentrism and
Critical thinking regularly involves the capability to interpret information and make knowledgeable decisions based on such information. Additionally, problem solving is frequently theorised as the use of critical thinking skills towards the effective solution of a specific problem or towards a specific end goal. Critical thinking is the disciplined art of ensuring that you use the best thinking you are capable of in any set of circumstances. The general goal of thinking is to figure out some situation” (Critical Thinking, 2001, p.1), solve some problem, answer some questions, or resolve some issue. It also is a process in which a person pursuits reliable and pertinent information about the world. Critical thinking is often described as reasonable, ruminative, trustworthy, and a well-practiced form of thinking that assists people with deciding what they should believe in and what actions should be taken. A practiced critical thinker will ask good questions, collects pertinent data, categorizes common characteristics, logically reasons with the new data and then he or she will come to a trustworthy and dependable conclusion. Critical thinking makes use of many processes and procedures. Some processes include but is not limited to asking questions, making judgments, and identifying