Yvonne Barrett's List: Creative thinking

• Recognizing Ethnocentrism and Stereotypes
• Recognizing Ethnocentrism and Stereotypes
• ritical thinking is the process of evaluating what other people say or write to determine whether to believe their statements.
• Recognizing Ethnocentrism and Stereotypes
• you can become a more sophisticated consumer of information if you can identify the speaker's viewpoint.
• It's important to remember that a factual statement may be false or taken out of context and thus be misleading. Likewise, on some issues, a statement of opinion might be the most important of all. The point is to practice distinguishing the difference between a fact and an opinion, not make evaluative judgments about them.
• A primary source is original material or information that has not been interpreted by another person.
• A secondary source is made up of information collected from numerous primary sources that is interpreted by the collector.
• Primary sources often have the immediacy of an eyewitness. They can provide details that may not be available to an outside observer or scholar. But they may also present information in a manner colored by the author's personal views or experience.
• The secondary source author has the advantage of hindsight and, in many cases, access to several primary sources and thus to several perspectives.
• But a secondary source is only as factually accurate as the primary sources it uses. And the secondary source author may write an account as colored by personal views as an eyewitness might.
• Some sources are not clearly primary or secondary and must be considered carefully
• learn to discern what information is most valuable for completing an assignment or report.
• content is the reflection of the biases, both political and cultural,
• ritically examine sources of information to determine point of view and to find out how this point of view affects the accuracy of their coverage
• Learn to question a source: What are its intentions? What are its biases? What does it gain by presenting a particular perspective?
• adequately reflects the time period of the topic being covered
• timeliness
• usefulness.
• Deceptive arguments often distract people from the vital issues and focus their attention on matters of little importance
• then by ridiculing their argument, the author diverts attention away from the issue
• By generalizing
• deceptive arguments.
• examples below fall into eight broad headings.
• ecognizing deceptive arguments is pivotal to the evaluation of opposing viewpoints.
• ttitudes--stereotypes--assume that all members of a group share the same set of characteristics.
• Ethnocentrism is a specific form of stereotyping which holds one's own nationality, religion, or cultural traditions and customs as superior to others.
• tereotypes and ethnocentric beliefs are not always negative. However, seemingly positive generalizations can have negative effects. Positive stereotypes can skew arguments and obscure the truth just as negative ones do.

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