How do we isolate perception while applying critical thinking concept and process?
Example, while a flight attendant pre-boarding a flight from los angeles to london, there were a group of middle eastern man boarded the aircraft. Some of them was checking out the aircraft interior. And asking questions about the flight duration and will there be a meal served. One of the man was also hold a News magazine about the post 911 attack.
This kind of questions, if its was asked by a an asian or a white person, you will think it is normal. But when its was question by a middle eastern man it start to raise a red flag.
Applying the technique from American philosophical association,
First, the Flight attendant gathered as much information as possible from the resource that he/she have from the ground staff.
example, the passenger’s manifest and talk to the agent who had check them in,…Even talking to those men… turned out everything seems to be fine, but the flight crew still felt uncomfortable letting those men be on their flight to london due to deception. So, shall we allow them to board the aircraft? or we need more evaluation and observation? What will be the protocol?
With open mind, willing to reconsider and all information collected are being considered. May fear be the issue?
Favorite Answer
I think that’s a tricky and important issue. On the one hand, emotions – including prejudice – can cloud clear thinking. On the other hand, emotions are often grounded in very subtle reasoning that can only be sucessfully understood after the fact. How many times have you thought something like, “Ah ha! Now I know why I was so uncomfortable at that party!” realizing that what initially appeared to be an irrational, gut-level response was in fact grounded in a series of semi-conscious perceptions and reasonable inferences?
Emotions, then, can both deflect good reasoning and stem from it, and it’s excrutiatingly difficult to determine which of the two is happening at any particular moment – especially at those moments when we need to make that determination, moments at which emotions are running high.
One approach, it seems to me, is to be aware of the kinds of emotion that tend, in general, to be inimical to reason. In this case, the flight crew might recognize that any discomfort that persists after the investigation you describe is more than likely a residual fear stemming from the normal human tendency to over-generalization that grounds racial prejudices and other irrational attitiudes. The fear, therefore, is probably not an indicator of the truth, but a reflection of how our human brains are wired. It may, therefore, be ignored – not allowed to affect subsequent decisions or actions – even though it might not be completely vanquished.
