Critical Thinking and Ethical Decision Making
Critical thinking and ethical decision making are crucial for academic success as well as career success. Both critical thinking and ethical choices allow an appreciation of diverse points of view using analytic approaches, create a tolerance for and an appreciation of ambiguity, allow for creative problem-solving, and give the ability to integrate knowledge from diverse viewpoints into unified ideas and strategies. To better understand how critical thinking and ethics impacts our success, we must analyze these skills and how they relate to us academically, and to our future careers. One way a strong analysis of critical thinking and ethics can impact our success is by allowing us to have a full understand of what critical thinking. A textbook definition would suggest that critical thinking is a higher-order of thinking or a collection of skills that are necessary to develop intellectually and assist us in questioning assumptions. It allows us to decide if something is ethical, true, false or somewhere in between. Once you understand what critical thinking consist of, it can be applied to real life decisions related to academics or in our careers. For example, having a full understanding, you become more independent and less susceptible to world-views that can lead to narrow-mindedness or resistance. The three-tier model of thinking is the breakdown of the thought process of a good critical thinker. The first tier is based on experiences which include firsthand information or empirical facts gathered from other sources. The next level to critical thinking is interpretation of our experiences. This is how we sort-out our experiences and form our perceptions of situations. Finally, an analysis of our interpretations and the perception of others is done. For this to be efficient academically and in our future careers, it is best done collectively because we can bring together different experiences and perceptions. For example, in a business environment,