Egocentric Thinking

Egocentric thinking means that we think through our own perspectives. We only have our perspective.

Egocentric

  1. having or regarding the self or the individual as the center of all things
  2. having little or no regard for interests, beliefs, or attitudes other than one’s own; self-centered

Intellectual Empathy means being able to think through other peoples perspectives. Seeing an issue through more perspectives than your own. This is very important for critical thinking since we want to consider an issue from as many perspectives as possible to better see and understand an issue.

We only have our perspective and experience informing how we perceive issues. Critical thinking requires that we get as many perspectives in order to become more informed. We need to place ourselves in others perspectives in order to see if our perspective if fair, just, or biased.

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Photo by Todd Robertson, courtesy of the Southern Poverty Law Center

Our perspective might be biased, racist, prejudiced, incorrect, or ignorant of facts.

Multivocal Arguments

An important aspect to consider when writing about an issue is to consider the topic from multiple perspectives.

This will be important to use in your argumentative essay.

Let us consider a topic to look at from multiple perspectives:

  • Bullying
  • Is college worth it?
  • Current Protests

Take a couple minutes and write as many different perspectives as you can think of related to the topic.

In-Text Citation

Also called parenthetical citations.

One Author: (Ramos 1)

Two Authors: (Smith and Ramos 1)

Three or more Authors: (Ramos et al. 1)

Citation

Here is the format:

Author(s). “Article Title.” Source, vol. #, no. #, season year, pp. xx-xx. Database, URL.

Example:

Kong, Les. “Business Sources for Education Majors.” Education Graduate Students Journal, vol. 75, no. 4, 2014, pp. 12-19. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/52506788.