Deductive thinking is one of the greatest super powers. With proper deductive skills, you can learn so much about things that people would not expect you to know. You can then use this knowledge to improve your life, and make specific improvements that are efficient. So, how can you do this secret technique.
To be a deductive thinker, first you must improve your knowledge acquisition skills, and general knowledge. Then you must improve your ability to separate your own biases and notice other people’s biases. Finally, you must improve your ability to see connections and themes between the most obscure facts then pin them to the biases you see in the peoples, thus allowing you to uncover something hidden.
These are the basic tenants of deductive thinking. But for more specific information, there is more information right here.
What Is A Deductive Person?
A deductive person is a person who proficiently and habitually uses general knowledge, and information to discover and piece together specific information that would have been hard to discover by most.
The best example of a deductive person would be Sherlock Holmes. Let’s say there is a murder scene with pink chalk marks on the wall. While most people would imagine its a murder scene, Sherlock Holmes figures out it is actually a botched crime scene.
Firstly, he knows that fire mixed with specific chemicals leaves a pink mark that looks like chalk marks (general knowledge). He knows that this chemical is often used to make boxes that store diamond. Also he knows that the metal working smith is fond of using fire. So he figures that the smith was trying to steal the diamond by burning the box (specific information that would have been hard to discover for the other detectives).
This skill in tendem with other life development skills, will allow you to get a grip of your life.
Why must everyday people develop their deductive skills?
Look at it like this. If Sherlock had been the one planning to steal the diamond, do you think he would have been caught? Exactly.
“Deductive reasons is a sequential thinking process driven by reasoners’ meta-deductive knowledge and goals that requires the construction and manipulation of representations.”
National library of medicine study
In simple words, deductive reasoning is a process driven by general knowledge, and specific goals which requires creation of general truths. Using these truths to make productive plans to reach these goals.
However, can this skill be developed?
Can you train to become more like Sherlocks?
Yes you can. The study I am quoting was conducted by University in Spain, and published in the National Library of Medicine. They found means of increasing student’s deductive skills, also a “metacognitive training procedure on executive functions to improve deductive reasoning.”
Through the use of cognitive deductive principles such as consistency, and necessity. Along with using deductive strategies such as exhaustivity and counterexamples, you can have a better way of using working memory (general knowledge) to achieve your desired specific goals.
How To Improve Deductive Thinking Skills?
1. Define the situation
The first step is trying to list out as much general knowledge that you know from the top of your head about the situation.
In simpler words, you just need to define the situation. Define the situation as you understand it so that you can gain access to all the general knowledge you know about the situation.
If you want a formula for how to define a situation, first write down exactly what is happening. You can do this by first writing an actor. This can be a person, organization or general concept like time.
Then you write down the negative consequences that is caused by this actor agent. These are easy to imagine. A simple tip to help you with this is that you need to imagine a subject that is being acted upon by the actor. This can be a person, organization, or general concept too.
Finally, list everything that you know about these problems.
Examples
Finally, to the examples.
Let’s say the situations you are dealing with are financial issues, or your bother is being kicked out of class.
“My expenses (actor that is a general concepts) are depleting too much of my money (subject).” (a more politically correct way of saying ‘I am almost as poor as the writer of this article’).
Or, “The school (actor) kicked my brother (subject) out.”
Finally, list out everything you know about the defined situation. What do you know about making money, and being financially stable? You need to make more money than you spend. To make money, you need to create a product that people will pay for.
For your brother, you could say schools kick out kids for misbehaving. Your brother has been kicked out of earlier schools before. You brother is often causing trouble at home.
Try to list out at least 10 general things that you know about these defined problems.
2. Start to find consistency
The second step is to try and see the common themes amongst these general informational pieces that you have managed to bring up and define.
In qualitative research methods, this stage is called discourse analysis. You basically analyze the information that you have managed to gather.
Techniques used to discover these are techniques such as coding. Coding is taking placing a word to describe elements in a piece of writing.
You do this in two ways.
First, you pay attention to the most requiring words, and you write those down. For example, two people may be explaining their experiences on the new ride in the park. One keeps using the word out of control, while the other keeps using the word scary. The words that people use tell us more about what they feel, and who they are.
The second technique is to start noticing patterns and assigning them a word, then seeing how many times they occur.
For example, you could be analyzing the interview with the two people. One keeps speaking about constriction, “I held my bag” “I tied my legs around the side” “my throat was tied”. The second keeps speaking about conquering, “I fought the wind” “I kicked of the ground” “I was scared, but I swallowed it.”
Do the same with your defined terms. Write down the recurring words from your definitions. Then write down the recurring themes, and messages.
The third step is to find consistent themes with the information you have. Let’s say you know about the grass and how wet it gets, but you do not know anything about football. Yet, you can know the significance of someone coming to a stop after running so quickly, so you know that footballer is good.
Examples
You see that? Just by knowing the consistent, adjacent information, you start to know about the specific information that you did not know.
Do that with your situation too. After defining it and learnings the principles that you know, try to find some adjacent, consistent information that will help bust what you do not know.
Maybe you keep using the word value in your financial part. Also, the recurring theme could be that you do not have value.
A recurring theme with your brother could be him always getting in trouble around adults. A recurring message could be him not trusting control.
3. Try to be aware of your own position, and biases in situation
The third step that you can do is to try and be conscious of your own specific biases.
One of the goals of the study is to “uncover the fallacies in discourse”. They are teaching to students how to uncover the fallacies in discourse.
Human beings respond to value and threats. Basically, response means attention. We give attention and emotional response to things that are a value or a threat to us. If it is neither a threat nor valuable to us, we feel no emotional reaction to the thing.
If a person walks through a room, and when they come out the other side and are asked what’s in the room, they will often notice the things that are valuable or threatening to them. A poor person will say there was a wallet in there if there was, ignoring and probably forgetting everything else in the room. Meanwhile, an oppressed person may notice the nazi flag in the corner, tucked away.
Fallacies are born from this fact.
When thinking, we tend to mix the general knowledge and facts with what is specifically threatening or valuable to us. it leads to cognitive distortions. These lead to us not being able to see the full picture, and scope of the information, the same way those two people who entered the room failed to see what the other person saw.
After completing step 1 to 3, you will have a series of general knowledges about the specific situation you have described. Now, you need to define what is valuable and threatening to you about the situation, so that you can avoid mudding the thinking process with your own flawed emotions, and can open your mind to all the possible elements, even ones you would have never considered.
How to discover specific value and threats?
This is done in two ways. First, emotional value and threats. An emotional value is something that makes you look better, and makes you feel good from an emotional perspectives. For example, the feeling you might feel when people see you with a beautiful person, when your father tells you they are proud of you, or when your mother says they love you.
An emotional threat would be embarrassment, humiliation, degradation, and insecurity. As people we try to get the things that make us feel the positive value and avoid things that will make us feel the negative value.
The physical value can be money, food, sex, and shelter or stuff like that. Fairly easy stuff.
So, observe the described situation, and ask what could possible cause you distraction about your situation.
For example, your financial situation. What emotional threat does it cause? Insecurity from not being able to take care of yourself. Maybe humiliation from not being able to work. When you know these, you will know what to watch from yourself. Now, as you make your plan, make sure that you do not make or take steps that are guided by your humiliation or your insecurity.
If you will make more money by saving your money and not buying that car, then save the money until your business is stable. You may think its logical to buy the guy but that is a cognitive distortion.
Also with your brother. You may feel frustration at him. Also, you may feel disappointment. However, when you take your next steps, you now know what your feelings are. Do not allow them to control you. You may be tempted to yell, and point out the number of times this has happened. But that could only worsen the situation.
It is better to be firm, and stern, but do not be retributional.
Also, knowing the physical threats and values will protect you from manipulation. You know that you are more emotional responsive to money offers, so yo will control your impulses.
4. Learn to see other people’s gains and losses in situation
The fourth step is you having to learn other people’s values and threats.
So, we have established that our own values, and threats can make us zone in on ourselves. This leads to us ignoring all the other peopel and perspectives aroudn us.
The same is true for other people.
They are in their own world. And now that you have discovered your own world, and are actively avoiding it, it is time to notice other people’s worlds. Pay attention to what the other person could need. What is a threat, or a value to them.
Consider someone who is tryign to assist you. Ask yourself what they stand to gain from helping you. Or what will they lose if they do not help you.
Do step 5 but for the persbefore you. All siton before you.
For example, in the financial situation. Consider what is threatening to your boss, and what is valueable to your boss. They are threatened by not meeting their thly quotas, and therefore not deliverimers. They need you to assist them. Also, they value whoever can bring them the most for their customers.
So, your boss does not work you all the time, and try to cheat you becuse tehy hate you in particulary. It is because of their own individual problems.
5. Now you need to practice exhaustivity and counterexamples
The fifth step will be exhausting all the possible connections that you can find between all the information, and cllues that you have now.
So, now you have all the necessary pieces that you need. You have the general knowledge. Secondly, you have a means of keeping your own cognitive biases aside.
Now it is time you analyze the information you have gathered.
Take all the themes, and codes that you built, and try to connect them with the threats and values that you assumed the other person has. Do this with all the threats, and values until you have exhausted all possible case scenarios.
This will give you the key routes that are consistent and where you should walk. You will realize what your boss needs, and what you can offer, for example. Or what your brother needs, and how to best give them that.
When it comes to writing, you may realize just what you need to focus on to improve your writing, and how to make yourself do just that.
6. Now you need to figure out the necessity
The sixth step is to try and figure out what the bare necessary steps are.
Now that you know what you need to do in general (produce more useful things for the boss, then bargain for a higher pay for example), you need to simplify all this into a small steps. These are the necessary components.
What simple steps could help further this goal, that are within your capability?
For the finance, it could simply be walking up the boss, and negotiating a higher wage for more products produced. maybe even a new idea on how to easier sell the products to customers. Something that makes you more valuable.
Practice first
The sixth step will be practicing these concepts.
All of these things are things that deductive people do within minutes. You need to practice how to do all this within a matter of minutes, if not hours. And practice makes perfect.
So how can you practice these things?
All great practice is composed out of 2 parts; firstly you can do it multiple times, and secondly, you need to get a report on your attempt so you can learn if you must try again.
The first place you can practice is with movies. Watch a mystery movie, or read a mystery book, and stop at the mid point. Guys what the truth is. Movies provide fast report of your process, and also, there are multiple movies so you can have multiple attempts.
The second is with real people. You could watch family members first. Actually observe and describe them. Then try to code their behavior, and give it a theme. Finally, you need to deduce what their childhood was like. if you are right then you improve. If not, try again. This one also has immediate reports since your family members can tell you if you are write or wrong. But you have limited family members.
You can do the same with friends to. However, theya re probably even more limited than family members, so you won’t have limitless attempts.
Finally, when you have used up all your friends, you can move on to random strangers. Try to analyze and deduce who they are at their core. What do they want? Why?
When you can do this, it will be easier to understand people, and yourself. This will allow you to create specific and detailed plans that could e efficient in improving your studying, and practice. Or it could just be useful in improve your career. When all is said and done, you will have gotten that much closer to mastering mastery.