Steve_Bamlett_blog

What’s the trait you value most about yourself?

Trait theory derived from the work of the psychologist, Gordon Allport. It contends that human personality is characterised by traits that resemble states of being, feeling and thinking but which are stable and enduring.They emphasise a view of psychological development that is heavily influenced by innate oor inborn disposition rather than later reactions to external environmental conditions.

In most accounts of trait theory thereafter, we sense the shadow of Hans Eysenck, who tried to explain the enduring nature of traits as a reflection of innate genetic bias, applicable not only to individuals but group categories such as sex/gender and racial differences. His explanation rooted them in differences of inherited brain functioning that are themselves explained as largely the effect of genetically caused internal factors. That Eysenck is now remembered most for his pernicious and false view of racial traits is itself a reason trait theory needs to be examined very critically.

Traits properly speaking are not really described in one word but by binaries which operate at the extremes of a range of possibilities between them, the most well known being extraversion and introversion, partly because of the prominence given to the trait by Carl Jung and the tool for measuring it, the Myers-Brigg indicator. In a once very popular account, all individual differences in some way related to what became known as the Big Five scales of trait expression. Many of these, psychoticism in particular, aren’t now considered that easy to use descriptively without offence. Sometimes, offence is the most correct response to their application though their remaining adherents stress that the terms used in them are not to be interpreted in the way they are in common parlance.

All of which background is necessary to approach the idea that critical thinking is a reflection of character traits rather than a acquired skill applied often with resistance, so offensive is it often taken to be. Described on a scale between over-fastidious nit-picking to offensive elitism, it comes in for some stick and I know few educationalists now who place it is as highly as a qualitative aim of education as it was in my schooling.

I think one reason for this is its association with the left in politics and the contemporary bad habit of characterising persons as ‘woke’ as if awareness of ingrained structural bias in society were only itself an obnoxious trait related to your position on the Agreeableness Trait scale. It is not as ‘agreeable’, is it, to be forever questioning the terms of reference people use.

But that is the aim of critical thinking: to unpack the assumptions behind the terminology of questions and their mode of asking and to start from the basis of utmost agreement in terminology and other understandings between persons in dialogue. It can be taught. It often isn’t. It can become habitual and perhaps that is not always helpful because it makes one appear aggressive or as if you were making a special case for your own understanding of things over that of others

Let’s not go there then. Critical thinking is under threat now and I think we need to rally to its defence. This is not because it is the only thing of value in conversation. We will always need skills that maintain dialogue as well as disrupt its processes of finding common ground and dialogue maintenance, as critical thinking sometimes does.

To be clear I think critical thinking may always have to be subject to the value of communication skills, which, without patronising, check the basis of mutual understanding. Without that checking critical thinking will without doubt be perceived as a personal trait of the person being this critical and a disagreeable one at that, for it puts a positive value on disagreement.

I think this happens to me because one trait of mine is that I don’t always filter communication enough to ensure people don’t see that critical thinking as a signal.of my own false pride in an engrained skill in the handling of critique that I will not ever let go of because of that evaluation. But then is that not because I have not given enough prominence to building skills of group maintenance. I can use such skills when I need to, after all. One can’t survive as a social worker or teacher without them. But do I use them habitually. Perhaps the trait in me that is unlikable is impetuousness. And Eysenck sees this as a sub-trait of his definition of neuroticism. You can’t win can you. Lol. X

All love

Steve