Book - Becoming a Critical Thinker - Suggestions in Social Media

Fernando Topete

PSY304

April 4, 2016

Chapter 9: Fair-Mindedness

This week’s material was very educational. In our book Becoming a Critical Thinker, chapter 9: Fair-Mindedness we learned many things like understanding that a critical thinker is aware of egocentrism, ethnocentrism, and the effect of emotions on judgment. In this chapter we covered many things like; defense mechanism that clouds our thinking, rational approaches, critical thoughts, points of logical vulnerability, and more. We learned about ethnocentrism and often times referred to as sociocentrism, and that it is the tendency to view our own group as superior to all others. We learned in the contrary about the meaning of fair-mindedness and how it involves the respect for people whose ethnicities and traditions are different ours, that we should have the willingness to hear and understand other view points.

        In the first video we learned about ways that ethnocentrism can lead to misjudgment of others and discrimination. I was able to get a full description of what it meant in pictures. There was one that I was not aware of that hit home to me, I grew up and am Hispanic/Latino and an image had a sign on a wall that said that no Mexicans where allowed to be served at a restaurant that only White’s where allowed. I have never seen anything like it but sadly I was not surprised.

        In the video about egocentrism we learned the deeper understanding of how the two children where able to see different things depending on how they saw the world and what they learned to see. One kid expressed that everything he saw the lady must have seen, where the second child realized that her side showed other things and not only the stuff that he saw on his side.

        On our third video about Defense Mechanism we learned about Freud’s eight defense mechanisms. We learned from the girls experience with parking tickets that we often make excuses and jump to conclusions as to why we end up in trouble. The girl had proceeded to imply that it was her gender, age, skills, ethnicity that brought her those tickets. The problem was that then she elaborated the reasons behind that support the tickets and justify the wrong doing, she was speeding, she violated parking place, etc.