Things you don't learn in school. How to think rationally?

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Solutions to significant problems facing modern society demand a widespread qualitative improvement in thinking and understanding. . .. We need a breakthrough in the quality of thinking employed by both decision makers and by each of us in our daily affairs.  

—Ornstein, in Costa, 1991  

Have you ever been in front of a big problem and you don’t know how to get to a solution? You think and think but it feels as if you are just going in circles. If you turn on the television or open a newspaper, you are bombarded with issues and events that happens in our society on a daily basis. 

Often enough we don’t know even know what is real and what is not real. We get more and more confused daily and, in the end, we struggle to help our children to successfully operate in an extremely complex world. Because we as adults are so confused, we don’t always fully understand a situation. This doesn’t mean we don’t think about it, but we often make the wrong decisions because we don’t fully understand or consider a difficult situation.  

Just because we think about something doesn’t make our thoughts rational.  

Rational thinking is the ability to consider all the relevant variables of a situation and to access, organize and analyze relevant information to arrive at a conclusion.  

Intelligence also plays a roll in the way a person resolves an issue, or solve a problem. An intensive study of thought and thinking itself, is a way to improve your solution skills, but in the end, you need to arrive at a rational solution to solve a problem, and to actually do something about the problem.  

Rational Thinking as a Series of Steps 

Much of what you do in your daily life, involves a process of some sort. A few actions and repeatable steps are practiced to reach a specific goal. 

Think about baking a cake: You need the ingredients, the measurements, the oven, and most importantly the recipe. You need to follow all the instructions in the recipe to bake a successful cake.  

When you change a tire, there are certain steps to follow. 

When you write an essay, there are certain steps to follow. Without following the correct steps, the outcome might not be desirable.  

Each PROCESS requires an INPUT to produce and OUTPUT.   

Let’s go back to the cake. To bake a cake, you need to follow the instructions very clearly. Just because you are in a hurry, you cannot change the desired temperature of the oven to bake the cake faster right? 

You are either going to burn the cake to a crisp or it is still going to be raw on the inside. If the cake burns, you don’t have a delicious cake anymore!  

This is the same way it works for rational thinking. There is a specific process that needs to be followed with special input to receive a proper output.  You need to focus on all three these terms to get the desired outcome. To focus only on the input cannot ensure success. Equal attention needs to be given to the process and the input, in other words how to analyze and organize and collect this data. 

Once you have everything in front of you or in your mind, then you can find a proper outcome.  

How do we learn to think rationally?  

This is not a superpower that we are born with, so most people learn how to think rationally through experiences. If someone asks you now how you learned to think rationally, you might not be able to answer them. 

It is also almost impossible for you to explain your rational thinking process to others.

Let’s think about a juggler. Do you think that he was born with the skill to throw balls in the air and catch it? 

No, he practiced and practiced and went through hours of practice to become a successful juggler. How do you become a pro at something? 

Of course, you practice it! 

An expert on a topic is not born with that knowledge, but worked hard and trained a lot to become an expert in that particular field. By the time someone becomes an expert the process of their way of thinking becomes difficult to explain.  

This expert’s thinking process still takes place, but it comes naturally and is sort of an invisible process.  Think about the following: You are put in an aeroplane and you have to fly. 

How are you going to fly if you have no guidelines on how everything works?  If you get the plane in the air, how are you going to land it without the proper guidance? 

You can be sure that you’re going to crash the plane at some point.  Now take a sixteen-year-old teenager and put them in the cockpit without any training. 

With no training how do you expect them to fly? 

Can you now see why teenagers have it so difficult and make so many stupid decisions? If someone is not trained to think, how can you expect a sixteen-year-old to even think rationally? 

Who is going to teach them the basics of rational thinking?  

To think rationally is not the same as learning how to fly a plane or play a sport. It is not something that can be broken down into steps because it is an invisible process. If you think about something and then find a solution it is difficult to describe the process of how you actually came to that specific conclusion.  

What are the obstacles and consequences of the unintended thinking process? 

• We learn through trial and error. We constantly practice how to think, and even though we make plenty of wrong decisions, it is a certain way to learn how to think. It could however be a high price to pay if you keep on making the wrong decisions.    
• We are very limited in the ability to teach others to think. We need to understand the process of thinking before we can teach others.  
• We rely too much on previous experiences, therefore, to teach a person how to handle a situation is difficult, because not everyone will solve a problem in the same way. Often, we have the skill but don’t know how to explain it to someone else.    

Different Strategies for Different Situations

Every problem has a solution. This should make complete sense, but the way that different people treat the same problem may vary considerably. Much like a doctor treating all the different diseases with the same medication. It’s not going to work, and the problem-solving tools that we use, tend to treat all problems in exactly the same way. 

How do you treat different situations? 

You have to compare a situation towards something that has already happened. Check what the solution was to solve the problem and then change it to fit into your situation. It might work, or it might not.  

Benefits of Treating Rational Thinking as a Process 

Rational thinking should be treated as a process.  If you do a series of repeatable steps, you can produce a meaningful conclusion.  

Think about a Math teacher: Students are often advised by the teacher to show all the steps on how to get to an answer. If you can see all the steps of a sum you might receive more marks, or you will at least see where you made mistakes.  It should work the same when you solve a problem.  Unless you specifically understand how someone arrived at a specific conclusion, you can do nothing but criticize them, but if you break the process of thinking into clear steps then you can help them find a solution.  

Much like when you learn to play a new sport. Your coach will teach you the correct steps to follow to get to your goal and if you put all the skills together then you score.  The same can be done with learning how to think more rationally. The more you practice the more your thinking will improve.   

Just remember it is not always to say that when a certain problem occurs that the solution that worked the previous time will work again. 

What we already know might already be outdated, so we can also not only rely on previous experiences.  In the workplace or a class situation it is often required to work together in finding a solution or reaching a conclusion. 

The problem usually is that different people think differently, and each have their own opinion, so it is important to listen to everyone’s suggestions and to learn from other people’s thoughts and expressions. Once you become more aware of the way you have to think, then you are making some progress towards more rational thinking.  

The rational thinking process always stays the same. It is not dependent on a situation, and you can apply the process to any situation even though the situation might be a new situation that you have never dealt with before.  

Once you see thinking as a process then you can start helping others to improve their ability to think.