Are we all going to die or what? We follow the news, seeing all the dangers of virus infections, climate change, and rioting in the cities. I can imagine that you probably feel compelled to know what is going as much as I do. It is not just that we prefer to have explanations, but rather we must have them. Our minds feel compelled to make sense of the circumstances in our lives and make things more predictable to diminish anxieties of an uncertain future. Even if those explanations are not always valid, they still enable us to cope with the dangerous world. But what about all that fake or misleading news out there? Just the presence of a plausible explanation for a situation is enough to trigger some feelings of safety and contentment that our pattern recognition worked. It allows us to freely shift into anger at the resulting explanation since the only reason Jimmy dented our new sports car was because he is a moron. I am not lending my car to Jimmy again, that’s for sure. A Critical Thinker should understand that compulsion for finding an explanation. In my previous post about doomsayers, you can understand our desire to listen to them. We are thirsting for an answer to the dangers they are predicting. Without Critical Thinking, we can be susceptible to accepting their explanation to simply satisfy our anxiety. In satisficing the explanation an uninformed person can be led astray without proper analysis.
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