Critical Thinking And Decision Making Model

Running head: CRITICAL THINKING AND DECISION MAKING MODEL

Critical Thinking and Decision Making Model

MGT 350 Critical Thinking

October 10, 2004

Kevion

Critical Thinking and Decision Making Model

Critical thinking is the ability to be fair and open - minded while thinking carefully about what to do or what to believe. Critical thinking will allow one to assess the reasons for and against doing something and then make a decision on the basis of a fair assessment, not on the basis of emotions. Decision making involves identifying a symptom as a problem. A symptom is a sign or indication of something that appears to be the problem. This paper will attempt to examine critical thinking and the decision making model.

Critical Thinking and Decision Making Concepts

Critical thinking and decision making has a lot in common. In order to arrivie at a conclusive decision, one must be able to think rationally. To think rational is to think critically. Eichhorn (1991) came to a conclusion that people believe that people have to understand what someone else is thinking as well what they are thinking. "Critical thinking emphasizes logic and requires the questioning of assumptions; therefore, it can challenge people's biases and prejudices and cause students discomfort."(Eichhorn, 2001, p.4). "Judgment refers to cognitive aspects of the decision-making process." (Bazerman, 2002, p.2). Life can be viewed as a constant series of decisions. Only by making rational decisions does one "take charge" of their lives. Some decisions seem unimportant but are important. For example, every minute or two we answer, by our behavior, the question: What is the best use of my time right now? Any one decision about the next couple of minutes of our lives may be trivial but taken altogether the cumulative effect of making those millions of decisions determine the outcome of our lives, religion to accept and what to do socially with peers.

Decision Making Model

According to (Bazerman 2002), there are six steps that can be taken in order to apply a rational decision making process to each problem, thus the decision making model.

Define the problem: Find out the background facts about the problem.

Identify the criteria: These assumptions are important criteria which determine whether one should look at the particular data rather than some other data.

Weight the criteria: Criteria helps determine what to accept or what not to accept from the brainstorming. Criteria help determine the priority of the possible solutions below. Criteria help determine both the reasons one puts down and the relative weight one gives to each one.

Generate alternates: At this point, one must be able to come to different courses of action.

Rate each alternative on each criterion: This is the most difficult, but most important step of the decision making process.

Compute the optimal decision: After all of the five steps have been completed, one will have to multiply the ratings in step 5 by the weight of each criterion. Once that is completed, one must be able to add up the weighted ratings across all of the criteria for each alternative and last but not least, choose the solution with the highest sum.

The decision making model can be a very useful tool in our everyday lives. I find myself using this model everyday at work. For example, last week I was forced to make a decision