Question 1: Brain teaser

A famous architect builds a hexagonal holiday house in such a way that windows on each side point south to catch the sun. The first day that the new owners are in the house, they're amazed to see through the windows a large, furry animal slowly walk right round the house!

Two skill-stretching queries are: What colour is the beast? And how do you know?

• (a) It's brown, because most large furry animals are brown.
• (b) It's black . . . because bears are black.
• (c) It's white . . . because of the specifications for the windows of the house.
• (d) There's no possible way to answer this and if this is Critical Thinking, it's stupid.

Question 2: Word pictures

Each picture is made up of words, but also represents a common saying. Can you see what the everyday adage is?

• (a)

  

• (b)

  

• (c)

  

• (d)

  

Question 3: Spot the fallacy!

In the following example, try to pin down the precise problem with the argument. (For more on types of argument errors, check out Chapter 16.)

Many vegetarians believe that killing animals is wrong. If they could have their way, anyone who eats meat should go to prison.

• (a) Slippery slope
• (b) Begging the question or circular argument
• (c) Straw man
• (d) Non sequitur
• (e) Ad hominem
• (Tip: Don't worry if you haven't a clue what these are about — it's just jargon. But that's one thing a lot of these tests measure. Skip to the answers now, if you want a quick decoding of the language in this question.)

Question 4: Spot another fallacy!

In the following example, try to pin down the precise problem with the argument. (You can check up on the definitions for the argument types in the answers as well as find out in more detail about some more in Chapter 16.)

Tea and coffee both contain caffeine, which is a drug. Excess caffeine intake has dangerous side effects, potentially including heart attacks. Therefore, drinking tea or coffee is dangerous.

• (a) Slippery slope
• (b) Begging the question orcircular argument
• (c) Straw man
• (d) Non sequitur
• (e) Ad hominem

Question 5: Type-casting

Which one of the following scenarios best describes a situation in which emotion rather than logic or rational thought has been allowed to decide the outcome?

• (a) Mary hates looking at herself in the mirror. She thinks she has got too fat! So she decides to take up jogging.
• (b) Someone has just telephoned the college to say that they've planted a bomb in one of the buildings. Even though nothing like it has ever happened before, the school principal orders all the students and staff out of the buildings and tells everyone to go home.
• (c) Mark has a job interview at a Silicon Valley computer firm and wants to look the part at his interview. He buys some computer magazines and looks at the pictures in them of the kind of people who seem to work in high-tech businesses, and tries to make himself fit that style.
• (d) Jenny wants to buy a new car, but the model she likes best and can afford has high carbon emissions. She worries this may be the kind of buying decision that if lots of people took would contribute to climate change and be bad for the planet. She wants to ‘be the change’ she believes in, so she gets a different car that's less suitable for her needs but has a better environmental ‘footprint’.
• (e) The publisher is amazed at the new sales figures for Critical Thinking books, which are much higher than anyone had predicted. It decides in future to take very little notice of anything the marketing folk in the firm say.

Question 6: More type-casting

Jenny designs wallpaper for a big home decoration business. She's good at her job, but is caught out when a new and enthusiastic man joins the company and asks her for ideas for a new marketing campaign for the wallpapers? Marketing and advertising aren't her area of expertise at all.

Should she:

• (a) Find out what other wallpaper manufacturers are doing to market their designs, and arrange to chat with people in the marketing department to get their views and share a few ideas. (Brainstorm it too, maybe.)
• (b) Email the new man in marketing (copy to the CEO, colleagues) that she's the wrong person for this task, because she knows nothing about marketing. Suggest that if he can't think of anything himself, he should look around for someone with the right skills.
• (c) Politely acknowledge the request for info, and promise to deal with it as ‘a priority’. Then make sure she's not available until long after the decisions have all been taken anyway by someone else. After all, they'll probably be better qualified to handle it anyway.

Question 7: Business skills

You're stressed out about the mountain of work piling up and realise that you can't possibly finish it all. What's the smart way to meet the challenge?

• (a) Do the best you can, if necessary working evenings and weekends, and skipping meals, to get it all done in some form or another.
• (b) Send a note to everyone involved stating clearly that your workload is excessive and you can only do a proper job if some of the deadlines are extended and less new work is set.
• (c) Recognise that it is your feelings that are the key factor — you feel tired and stressed! Reduce your working hours, take more time off, have proper meals and maybe go somewhere nice at the weekend too.

Question 8: Time management

In your job you always seem to have several tasks to complete by the end of the week. What's the most efficient way of organising your time?

• (a) Be linear: Take the jobs one thing at a time, not starting a new task until you finish with the one at hand.
• (b) Multitask: Tackle everything at once, because this stops you getting bored and some areas overlap, thus immediately saving time.
• (c) Recognise that the problem isn't your way of working but the amount of time you have. Take a strict look at your daily timetable and clear out all the unnecessary jobs and commit yourself to putting in extra hours until the backlog is cleared.

Question 9: Justice for TV watchers

Have a look at this argument:

In Britain, every household pays the same amount for their televisions, regardless of how rich the household is, or how many TVs they have — or how much they watch them! Surely this is unfair. Instead, TV should be made a subscription service so that those who watch the most pay the most. This wouldn't only be fairer, but could also bring in more revenue.

Which of the following arguments uses the same principle as the one above?

(Hint: The question isn't about whether the argument is a good one or not, but rather about its structure.)

• (a) Things should only be available free to people if they can't afford them otherwise.
• (b) Discounts on bus and train fares should be available to people who travel most.
• (c) Rich people should pay a surcharge on their houses to help poor people who don't have a home at all.
• (d) Television channels should be funded by general taxation so that the richer you are the more you pay.
• (e) Internet sites that make a lot of money from advertising shouldn't be able to charge for access.

Question 10: Car rentals

Take a deep breath: here's the maths question!

Bodge-It Rental Cars rent out cars at a cost of £19.99 per day plus free mileage for the first 100 miles. An extra charge of £1.00 applies for every mile travelled over 100 miles.

Luxury Limos charge £100.00 per day for just taking the car out of their showrooms, and 20 pence for every single mile travelled.

How many miles would you need to travel before it paid for you to hire a Luxury Limo?

• (a) 101
• (b) 131
• (c) 151
• (d) 171
• (e) It's always cheaper to hire Bodge-It

Bonus question: The riddle of the old-fashioned brew

Hint. This is another maths question and is based on a question for one of the big Critical Thinking testing organisations.

The Munchkins family makes tea following the traditional rule: ‘warm the pot, and add one spoonful of tea per person plus one for the pot’.

The family used to buy a packet of Green Lion tea every week but because Grandma came to live with them, their tea buying has gone up. Now, every fifth week they buy an extra packet of tea.

Your question is: how many people were at home before Grandma arrived?

Argumentative self-control and Critical Thinking

Problems like these ones mean that Critical Thinkers also need to take a course in what's sometimes called argumentative self-control. This involves developing a psychological understanding of what makes people tick, alongside a logical understanding of the structure of arguments.

A good place to start is with some great tips prepared by two Dutch professors, Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst, as what they call ‘a code of conduct for reasonable discussions’. These appear in a book, alarmingly called Advances in Pragma-Dialectics (2002), where they set out their ‘ten commandments’ to guide anyone in a debate. Here's my take on their ‘best’ four ideas (the others become rather technical and even repeat the same broad points). Therefore, to explain your approach to argumentative self-control, you can, if you like, say that you're following Martin Cohen's Four Commandments, though it doesn't have a great ring, I admit.

• Rule 1: Don't stop your opponent from advancing a new position or challenging your position. The authors call this the ‘freedom’ commandment, and it underpins many of the others.

• Rule 2: Both sides must defend and justify their positions when asked to.
• Rule 3: Don't attack positions that no one has put forward. No matter how much fun it is and how clever it makes you look!
• Rule 4: Don't use anything except arguments to advance your position. For example, don't appeal to people's sentiments, let alone their prejudices or fears.

Rules for arguments are all very well, of course, and few people disagree with the general principles. But arguments in the real world aren't so easily sorted out. After all, they often happen because people make genuine mistakes, or have been misled by some erroneous information — such as something they heard on the radio or read in the newspaper or in Wikipedia! Add in distortions caused by strong emotional attachments and you have a rule book that isn't really sufficient for sorting out many arguments.

Above all, conscious efforts to observe the rules of argumentation are rarely sufficient to prevent ‘honest mistakes’.

‘It's only logically consistent, Captain’: Practical wisdom is virtuous

The ability to ‘recognise salient facts’, ‘open-mindedness in collecting and appraising evidence’, ‘fairness in evaluating the arguments of others’ and so on all look pretty useful and should help avoid mistakes in life. Funnily enough, the list of good instincts looks very like Aristotle's ancient ‘intellectual virtues’, written over 2,000 years ago (for background, see the nearby sidebar ‘Getting practical with Aristotle’).

Crucial to this section is Aristotle's practical wisdom, which he says is ‘a virtue and not a technical skill’. Practical wisdom deals with change and variety. Thus it's the part of the soul that forms needed opinions. Aristotle's Big Idea is that the character (ethos in Ancient Greek) of the arguer is crucial. Similarly, the French philosopher, Montaigne, also says that argumentational virtues are so sensible, that once learned, they become a sort of ‘second nature’.

Another virtuous habit useful for anyone involved in an argument is the ability to contemplate potential objections and alternative views. Doing so offsets the two-fold tendency of humans: to overlook what contradicts their existing beliefs and views; and to rest comfortably on sources confirming their biases.

The English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, expressed this attribute plainly in On Liberty (1859). He states that playing devil's advocate is the duty of all thinkers: that is, to throw themselves into the ‘mental position of those who think differently’. If they don't, even if they're well-educated, expert arguers and their conclusion is right, they don't know why they're right, because they haven't considered the arguments fully, deeply, equally and impartially.

In their book Logical Self-Defense (2006), Ralph Henry Johnson and J Anthony Blair see this problem as arising because ‘the act of reasoning is rarely carried out in a situation that lacks an emotional dimension’, that is, personal interests and involvements often distort the way people treat information and the way they argue, and emotional commitments make it harder to look at an issue from someone else's point of view.

Emotional intelligence skills

Goleman suggests that emotions play a much greater role in thought, decision-making and individual success than is commonly acknowledged.

He argues that the skills of emotional intelligence, which he sums up as self-awareness, altruism, personal motivation, empathy and the ability to love and be loved, is the key to success in life. Whereas other psychologists (for example, see the views of Daniel Kahneman in Chapter 2) want people to ignore their instincts and be more rational, Goleman wants them to tune in to their intuitions and trust their gut feelings. Check out the nearby sidebar ‘Thinking emotionally for success’ for more on Goleman.

Within the family, with friends and in the workplace, emotional intelligence (some people call it EQ, for emotional quotient, to contrast it with intelligence quotient, or IQ) means being able to listen to, predict and understand other people, and to know the right words to say.

Here are four tips for raising your EQ:

• Spot emotions: Be aware of other people's emotions. Try to notice and read nonverbal signals such as body language and facial expressions in those around you.
• Reason with your emotions: Use your emotions to guide your thinking, for example to help you prioritise. A common error is to give too high a priority to trivial things that are urgent, and neglect important things that don't have an obvious deadline. Using your EQ can counteract this tendency.
• Understand emotions: Emotions can conceal a wide range of causes. For example, if someone is getting angry, it may be because of what you've just done or are currently doing (which may trigger a defensive response from you). But it may also be because they just had some bad news (say, a speeding ticket on the way to work) or maybe they're just overtired. (In Dostoyevsky's famous book, Crime and Punishment, the detective Porfiry Petrovich displays great emotional intelligence and empathy in his investigation of Rodion Raskolnikov.)
• Handle your emotions: The ability to do this is the final key aspect of emotional intelligence. For example, an athlete may be tempted to perform a celebratory trick in the last lap — and maybe lose their focus — and the race. This actually happened at the 2006 Winter Olympics when snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis made the mistake of celebrating her gold medal before actually having actually won it and ended up with her face in the snow.

EQ not IQ

Unlike IQ, which is gauged by highly standardised tests (such as the Stanford-Binet ones), EQ doesn't lend itself to any single numerical measure. After all, by definition it's a complex, multifaceted quality representing such intangibles as self-awareness, empathy, persistence and social skills. Some aspects can, however, be quantified. Optimism, for example. According to some psychologists, how people respond to setbacks — optimistically or pessimistically — is an indicator of how well they succeed in life.

The good news is that emotional intelligence involves skills you can learn, such as ambition to achieve and emotional self-control, both of which build on underlying EQ skills such as self-management. This ability to manage yourself — to have self-awareness and self-regulation — is the key to managing others. For employees, how a leader or manager makes them feel plays a large role in their level of motivation. For customers and clients, how they feel about their interactions with the people in an organisation often decides their feelings about the place as a whole.

One way to boost your self-awareness is to undergo an evaluation by people you know well and trust as regards your emotional characteristics and competencies. There are some nice (and quick) tests on the internet, for example, which ask things like ‘do you regularly help people by pointing out their errors and faults?’ Try popping over to: www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/story.php?title=how-selfaware-are-you for one I did really badly on!

1: Brain teasers

The point of this little teaser is that the important information is present in the dull-looking line about the windows all facing south. The house must be at the North Pole, and the furry animal is thus white — a polar bear. It's easy — but unwise — to overlook the dull.

2: Word pictures

Each picture is made up of words, but also represents a common saying. What are they?

• (a) split second decision
• (b) one after another
• (c) up in arms
• (d) downward spiral

3: Spot the fallacy!

Slippery slope arguments are ones where someone plays on the fact that often the line between two things is hard to draw, but nonetheless, there is a generally accepted difference to be respected.

Begging the question or circular arguments assume at the outset what is supposed to be demonstrated later on.

Straw man arguments pose ridiculous examples only to easily knock them down later.

Non sequiturs, from the Latin, are claims that do not actually follow in any logical sense.

Ad hominem, again from the Latin, are arguments which attack the person making the claim, rather than deal with what they are saying.

You can legitimately say that this argument contains many fallacies, but I claim that the ‘Straw Man’ is the most relevant one to note. No vegetarians argue this and so the claim that they do is, well, made of straw.

4: Spot another fallacy!

This fallacy is ‘begging the question’ meaning that it is a circular argument. The idea is that the explanation used to back up your point relies on the assumption of what it's supposed to be proving.

5: Type-casting

I'd plump for (d) — Jenny and her new car — but honestly, you can make a case for most of them being rooted in ‘irrationality’. These questions are popular in Critical Thinking tests, but they're really rather subjective.

6: More type-casting

Well, I think you can guess that (a) is the ‘politically correct’ answer, especially in business circles. After all, she may not know about marketing but she does presumably know what's good about her designs. But in the real world, I have sympathy for the ‘directness’ of response (b), and in the very real world, the person who uses the third tactic I suspect will be the one who goes furthest!

7: Business skills

The correct answer is (c)! Amazed? But that's the view of most business-skills authorities who offer such questions. In the real world, I suspect answer (a) will get you further.

8: Time management

I think the correct answer is to prioritse — which I didn't put in here! Call it a trick question.

9: Justice for TV watchers

This is a very confusing question. It seems to be about ‘ability to pay’, but in fact, it isn't. Literally, the argument is those who use a service most should pay most. (If poor people watch lots of TV — they should pay most!) The only argument here putting that line is argument

(c) which seems to be saying the opposite: ‘Rich people should pay a surcharge on their houses so as to help poor people who maybe don't have a home at all.’

It would be easy to misread the question and plump for argument (d) ‘Television channels should be paid for by general taxation so that the richer you are the more you pay.’ I'd call this almost a trick question.

10: Car rentals

It's 151. It took me absolutely ages to work it out. Turn it into an equation, though, and it's easy to solve:

50 + (mileage – 80) — 1 = 60 + (mileage) — 0.5

(Note that multiplying by one is just for demonstration purposes.)

Bonus question: The riddle of the old-fashioned brew

The key thing here is that the amount of tea being drunk is up 25 per cent. You also know that Grandma is one person. One person thus requires one extra packet of tea every fifth week, which is a complicated way of saying that one packet of tea lasts one person five weeks, or that one person would be drinking one fifth of a packet in a week.

So previously, when one packet lasted a week, five spoons must have been in the pot, which corresponds not to five people but four people plus that extra spoon ‘for the pot’. The answer is therefore four people, and previously four spoons of tea must have been in the pot.

I've seen people discussing questions like this one on the Internet: they sometimes get the right answer — but for the wrong reasons, which may be okay in a test but not in real life. One person advising all the others even stated confidently that the ‘spoon for the pot’ was ‘completely irrelevant’. But of course, it isn't!