How to Solve Problems in Everyday Life - Essay Example

It seems that the majority of people are quite sure that in most circumstances they are acting in rational and justified ways, so it is perhaps due to this fact that it is such a difficult and delicate task to persuade a person that he or she may have been wrong. Considering this degree of self-assurance of people, does it mean we all posses enough of good sense to be always sensible, to make right decisions, and to be sure we are on the right track in life Sounds too idealistic. In fact, in practice we are often closer to the opposite of good sense - uncritical and impulsive decision making and action the results of which usually make us regretful. In my turn, I have wondered whether we could possibly even approach the ideal of rationality, and I believe that what is clear is that this task is far from being easy. After all, we, humans, have a too significant heritage of irrationality to live with and this is an integral part of our nature. As a demonstration of this may serve the great number of biases in human reasoning and decision making, when for instance due to the so-called 'confirmation bias' people tend to look for and believe only that which they already have a predisposition for, and ignore evidence for the contrary. Ironically, this type of bias is one of the main mechanisms that work to maintain the enormous popularity of horoscopes in our society despite the lack of scientific evidence for their validity, and is used for the promotion of such a chancy endeavour as lottery by overemphasising very slim possibility of winning and ignoring the real possibility of losing. Now, it is not surprising that the study of approaches to problem solving and thinking is that powerful tool which can help one efficiently employ ones ability for rational thinking and effective problem solving, and in the process understand how the general concepts and theories that study them apply to our everyday life that is rife with challenges such as the need for a person to decide whether to believe astrology, whether to gamble, how to be successful in career and in family life, and how to be able to tell propaganda in mass-media from the useful information. For the clarity of discussion, we can define problem solving as the process of using thinking for the resolution of various kinds of problems for which there is yet no action that would help achieve ones goals. So, the type of thinking involved in problem solving "has the task of devising some action which may mediate between the existing and the desired situations" (Duncker, 1945, p. 1). In this light, another example of how problem solving works in everyday life may be found in the business sphere where efficient problem solving is of especial significance. We can easily imagine the following business situation - a relatively small company is providing specialized equipment and corresponding service to a large and usually reliable business partner. Importantly, this small company is buying the agreed types of equipment preliminary, keeps it on their stock, and then supplies it to their partners customers in gradual shipments. So, it happens that their partner requests the availability of a very specific type of equipment that costs 30-40% more in contrast to standard time-tested models already popular on the market. The small company brings on stock the requested equipment for the total value of 30,000, but after a while it becomes clear that the demand for this specific type of equipment is much less than expected, so that after six months only one-fourth of the invested money are returned. But what is interesting for our discussion is that during the decision making process before the ordering of the specialised equipment the management of the small company, even having doubts about how quickly it would be sold, so highly had evaluated the successful business relations with their partner that it did not allow for an outright refusal. In this situation, the problem of whether to order new equipment was solved by the calculation of possible temporary losses and evident gains, which suggested that only a half of the initially requested amount of specialized equipment (for the total value of 60,000) had to be ordered. This method of problem solving borrows from the model of information processing described by Newell & Simon (1972) as the interaction between an information processing system embodied by a well-informed (and in some cases partially ignorant) problem solver and the task environment, which reflects the context of the problem. In the described case, the problem solver is the senior manager of the small company who, in contrast to representatives of their partner company requesting new equipment, is fully aware of the financial status of his organization and can correspondingly plan orders and project sales. As the context of the problem serves the lasting partnership between companies which augments purely financial calculations of the advisability of a new order with factors of strategic development that may sacrifice short-term advantages for the long term benefits. As a result, now this small company expects to dissolve the amount of remaining problematic equipment on stock in 9-16 months, but their partnership with a large company is well on the track, with the volumes of sales of traditional equipment rising, which fully compensates for the temporally frozen assets in the slowly moving specialized equipment. By the way, in this case we also can see the demonstration of what researchers of problem solving methods would term 'pragmatic reasoning schemas' which, in contrast to abstract inferential rules, relate to everyday issues of promises and obligations that business is rife with. More specifically, as according to Cheng & Holyoak (1985) we have schemas in the form of rules for contexts involving permissions and obligations that involve a precondition, in our outlined case permissions and obligations were embodied in the scheme of relations between companies when one partner was supposed to trust another, and the involved precondition was in the form of a smaller companys aim to preserve the partnership and minimise possible risks when experimenting with promotion of a new type of equipment. We can conclude that the ability to understand methods of problem solving and peculiarities of the rational and irrational thinking processes constitutes the critical skill needed for people in the modern world to understand driving forces behind dynamic changes around us. After all, if one fails to learn how to solve problems in everyday life, there will be those who might wish to exploit this person solely for their own benefit. Read More