 Hi, welcome to chapter six, Creative and Critical Thinking in the Small Group. In the next few slides, what we're going to do is talk a little bit about some of the methods and techniques that you can use to enhance creative as well as critical thinking and your group interactions. All right, so a couple of things here at the banding to consider is that groups are often considered a excellent source of ideas, right? One of the main reasons people join groups is that as members of the group, there is more ideas than you would have just functioning as individuals. That said, when it comes to the group's creative process, that we can see group creativity as being both a divergent and convergent process. So divergent thinking is when ideas vary inside the group, right? People go out, they think outside of the box, they try different things. The idea behind convergent thinking, however, is that eventually these ideas must come back together for the group to be successful. And I think this makes sense when you think of most group interaction, it's good early on to think outside the box, but as you conclude and move towards the actual completion of tasks, you wanna make sure that you and your group members are coming back together with your ideas. The next couple of slides will talk about some of the ways that you can do that. So there is a wide variety of ways to increase and create creativity inside the group. Let's briefly talk about three. One of the most common ways that groups engage in enhancing creative thinking is the process of brainstorming. Brainstorming is a technique in which group members generate a wide variety of ideas to ultimately come up with solutions, or topics, or directions for group interaction. There's a couple of things though about using brainstorming in an effective systematic way. One is to set aside some time to actually engage in the brainstorming process. During that time, you should try to focus on quantity and not necessarily quality of ideas. The next part of this is that don't evaluate any of those ideas at that point in time. The goal of brainstorming is to get a lot of ideas in the table and then to later, at a separate point in time, to evaluate those ideas. So brainstorm those ideas, don't evaluate, but make sure that you record them. It might even be good to set out a digital recording device or have somebody take notes. Then, at a separate setting, you wanna go ahead and evaluate those. A couple of tips, don't end too early, don't evaluate, and make sure that you have a chance to fully gain everybody's participation inside of that. Another really good technique is a technique called mind mapping. And mind mapping is a process of visually depicting an issue or a task or directions for a project that a group is in. And it usually involves starting with like a center idea and then drawing lines and processes and kind of flowing them out inside of that and connecting things together. Ultimately, through the process of creating a mind map, it allows the group's ability to understand the complexity and the nuance and the multiple parts of an issue before they are able to go ahead and address and look at that. And again, similar to brainstorming, don't be too evaluative as people come up with ideas, put them on the mind map, see where they fit, and then identify orphans and things that don't necessarily fit at a later point in time. One final really useful method for creating creativity is to engage in changing perspective. And this is a process where oftentimes people can get too locked into one way of thinking or about the situation and the constraints that exist for a given process. And it involves actually moving yourself out from your perspective, temporarily suspending reality and allowing yourself to consider other possibilities and ideas that you wouldn't, and then bring things back in to be able to gain a more cohesive idea as to what you're looking at. All right, now that we have a little bit of an idea as what encompasses creative thinking, let's talk about critical thinking and why it's important. So critical thinking is a type of systematic thinking that uses evidence, reasoning, and logic to make decisions. So when we talk about evidence inside of here, what we're talking about is the use of materials from credible sources, right? We're talking about empirical research that might have been published in peer reviewed journals or published by subject experts that make strong arguments that something is the way that we say it is and it is true. Reasoning and logic means that we are looking at things logically, that we are making sure there are things that are sound and that they ultimately are void fallacies, which we're going to get to in a couple of minutes here. When we put these things together to engage in systematic critical thinking, this allows us to be more effective and avoid some of the pitfalls of lacking critical thinking, such as groupthink. All right, the next concept we're talking about is that of argumentation. Oftentimes in life, many of the communicative things that we engage upon are actually arguments. What an argument is is a claim, a statement about what is or what ought to be that is supported with evidence and sound logic. So again, we're bringing back the tenets of creative thinking to ultimately put things together. So if I was to make a claim for that claim to become an argument, I would have to support that claim. I would have to explain why something is the way it is and then perhaps cite some sources or bring some evidence to pull it in without drifting into ill sound logic, which we'll talk about when we get to fallacies. There are a few different ways to kind of enhance critical thinking in a group. One of the most fundamental ways to do this is to have the right attitude. Having the right attitude includes being open-minded and being willing to consider new information and ideas. It can include having a sense of what we would call show me skepticism, which includes having members think for themselves, be open to hearing ideas, but be like, okay, I like your idea, it's interesting, but show me how it works. Make me understand what you're trying to say. Ultimately, you wanna be a good skeptical decision maker, which means that you wanna ask probing questions that are designed to help critical thinking by examining information and reasoning with more depth. Remember that critical thinking is an active rather than a passive process of testing information. Another thing that you can do is to evaluate information. And this means that you need to determine the meaning of what is being said, right? What is the information actually trying to say? What claims are it making and what is being supported inside there? An important skill to be effective at this is to be able to distinguish the difference of fact and from opinion and inference. So facts are things that can be verified through empirical observation and aren't necessarily arguable, right? Whereas opinion are inferences that go beyond facts and contain some degree of probability, right? We think that this might be true in this given situation. So go ahead and identify that. You wanna make sure that if there are any ambiguous terms that you've clarified those so that you can understand where those different possible meanings and probability comes to them. Last, you need to get good at determining the credibility of information, right? So this is evaluating the opinions and determining the credibility of the sources that facts and opinions are coming from. Some things that you should do here are that you should ask questions to decide how much trust a place in an opinion. You should think about, for example, is there any reason to suspect the person supplying the information of bias, right? Is there something that could be influencing them? Are there other sources that disagree with what they're saying? Are they an outlier of information or are what they say is what they're saying, you know, kind of consistent with other research that you've seen? And then finally, you wanna take a look at the source of the information to see if the individual that is speaking is actually a qualified, credible expert on the information that they are looking at. This is why in your presentations, just saying Dr. Smith tells us blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, isn't enough. We need to know who Dr. Smith is and why he's credible to be speaking on your presentation topic. All right, with that, that leads us into our discussion of logical fallacies. So first of the outset, you should know that there are well over 100 different fallacies. What they are are these logical statements that kind of show erroneous logic or reasoning and might even be manipulated or you know, perhaps on accident inside of there. Generally, logical fallacies are bad. They distract from the argument. Sometimes we see them on commercials and they're obvious and meant to be funny, but you should be careful because sometimes fallacies and arisen reasoning can be very subtle. There are a few different fallacies that we talk about in the chapter. I'm just briefly going to cover them, but it's good to kind of gain some more insights and reasoning. The more you understand about fallacies, the better you'll be able in terms of identifying them and separating good arguments and good information from ones that are logical. So one of the most common types of fallacies that we see there is the fallacy of a hasty generalization or of overgeneralization. And what this means is that you're drawing a conclusion from insufficient evidence, right? You're making a conclusion at an end point when in reality the evidence doesn't really support that the argument was reaching that. So you're kind of making a jump in logic in there. Another common fallacy is what we would call the either or fallacy. This is a fallacy that creates the false dilemma or binary by limiting the choice to two alternatives when there are more options, right? So then you can either do this or you can do that when there's 10 other things that you might be able to do inside there. My visual aid here in the United States of America, love it or leave it, is an either or false dilemma fallacy. The ad hominem fallacy is a fallacy that translates into against the man for Latin. And what this means is that instead of attacking your opponent's ideas, that you attack them directly, right? So something about them as opposed to the validity of the argument that they're making. So attacking the person instead of their ideas. Next, continuing on this discussion is the fallacy of the incomplete comparison. And this involves comparing two disparate things when the comparison is invalid, right? So it's kind of like making a false metaphor inside of here by looking at things that are differently related but different than this is the argument of fallacy from false cause. And this claims that one event leads to the next event but there is no link between these two things. If then, then this, but no explanation why if this one thing happens, this next thing does not follow. So the false cause leads us to problems inside of them. And the last fallacy that we'll talk about here is that of the slippery slope. And the slippery slope fallacy is an argument that suggests that there will be like a domino effect event that leads to disaster. If you do this, then this will happen which will lead to this, which will lead to this, which will lead to this, which in some ways is a chain of false cause fallacies that ultimately lead us to horrible things. For a false cause or for a slippery slope fallacy to be valid, there has to be evidence and support between every event mentioned to actually explain why we would end up in a disaster scenario at the end. You can't just make those jumps without evidence inside of there. All right, one final important concept to discuss as we wrap up this chapter is the avoidable but very dangerous concept of groupthink. What groupthink is, is a process by which members of a group cease to think critically and ultimately just develop an unhealthy norm of going in and conforming to the status quo and not questioning their ideas, right? So this is where groups tend to overestimate their power. They become closed-minded and there's a lot of cultural pressure inside the group to conform. One of the most famous examples of groupthink ending very tragically is the organization of NASA. During the Challenger disaster, there were individuals who were engineers and working on that that knew of some of the problems with the space shuttle before it happened but there had been multiple delays to the launch and so ultimately when the launch took place and led to the death of all of the members of the crew, this is something that would have been avoidable had groupthink not pressured people to keep quiet and not address those issues. So some of the techniques that you and your groupmembers can use to kind of prevent groupthink from happening is encourage a culture where groupmembers constantly discuss problems, right? Have people get out there and be willing to discuss ideas. Don't rush to get things done just for the sake of getting things done. Take the time to slow down and work through effective group processes. Establish norms inside the group of critically evaluating decisions and information inside of there. Like don't just rush through to get things done but take the time to critically look at things that are before the group. If there are leaders in the group, whether they're informal or formal leaders, leaders in general should step back from expressing their preferences too early because oftentimes in a group that's beginning to suffer from groupthink, a leader will say this is what we should do and no one else will question that. So if you find yourself acting in a leadership position, you need to keep your mouth closed for a while and allow people to organically reach some ideas and some considerations before offering your two cents. Then finally, make sure that you're not insulating the group from information. So try not to become too close to the system where outside information cannot come in and influence and impact the decisions that the group needs to make. All right, once again, thank you for watching. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at one of the many methods made available to you.