Aspiring to Self-Curated Thinking

Let’s assume that you aspire to independent thought. That aspiration is not automatic; it presumes metacognition – thinking about your thought process.  And a willingness to put forth the effort necessary for independent thought in our culture that relentlessly assails you with propaganda and other forms of manipulation.

Among the elements essential for independent thought, I offer two.  First consider your frame of reference.  What is it about you, the topic, and any potential receiver of your information that provide the contexts for your communication?  Among other things, those factors will determine the ideas that come into your mind, the words that you choose, and the conviction and passion with which you entertain and deliver your thoughts.  

Second, what sources and other particulars of objective data guide you?   Have you gathered relevant base rate information?  That is, information which provides as much reasonably valid relevant information about an idividual or group as possible. For instance, if the frame of reference is determined by your putative qualities and/or those of your identity group and contrasted with qualities of a different group, what base rates have guided you? Is it possible that you made absolutely no effort to gather any base rate information?  Perhaps you merely used your intuition, or mindlessly followed information provided to you by someone else.

The importance of frame of reference and base rates, of course, extend far beyond our evaluations of other people.  They also determine how we evaluate ourselves.  Double, K. S., et al. 2024) studied how accurately subjects were able to assess the effectiveness of their own ability to regulate the emotions of other people.  The investigators concluded that the subjects’ beliefs about their regulation efficacy of other people were strongly biased by the average level of emotion expressed by the regulation target. [base rate]. Stated simply, the subjects frequently believed that they helped when they had not helped or even when they had made the other individual worse in part because they did not know how well or poorly the others usually regulated their own emotions.   

REFERENCE

Double, K. S., Pinkus, R. T., Gross, J. J., & MacCann, C. (2024). Emotion regulation efficacy beliefs: The outsized impact of base rates. Emotion, 24(1), 234–240.