Hello friends,
It turns out that being intelligent doesn’t help much in achieving well-being, and that’s a good thing because it means there are better ways to be happy and successful in life than trying to be “smart” (in the conventional sense, at least). Of course, this also means that people we know who are super intelligent may not be doing as well as we might assume they are.
The better predictor of well-being in life is our ability to think critically, which is fundamentally different from intelligence. Writing in Scientific American, Dr. Heather A. Butler describes critical thinking as:
…a collection of cognitive skills that allow us to think rationally in a goal-orientated fashion and a disposition to use those skills when appropriate. Critical thinkers are amiable skeptics. They are flexible thinkers who require evidence to support their beliefs and recognize fallacious attempts to persuade them. Critical thinking means overcoming all kinds of cognitive biases (for instance, hindsight bias or confirmation bias).
The really good news is that we can improve our critical thinking skills without having to get smarter! There are many ways to do this, but we’ll explore how visual assessments can teach us to be better critical thinkers, as explained in a 5-minute segment of a talk by Amy Herman (who teaches an entire course on this subject).
Our warm-up question for this week:
Describe a piece of visual art that you are really drawn to. How did you first encounter it, and what does it mean to you?
See you soon,
Alex