Introduction
Sally is a 34-year-old woman working in customer service at a small printer company. She works primarily with customer complaints, and while she does her job well, she often overloads there. Her performance can be evaluated because she can understand customers, imagine herself in their situations, and find ways to help them, contacting the company’s leadership if necessary. At work, Sally successfully uses critical thinking to make the right decisions. However, as she is shy in expressing her opinion and always avoids any emotionally charged situations outside her job responsibilities, such as unpleasant conversations, it can be concluded that she has several barriers.
Elements of Critical Thinking
Despite being able to use critical thinking at work quite successfully, Sally demonstrated several barriers. She felt agitated and drained after many customer complaints due to the allostatic overload effect: Sally was over-focused on her work and forgot about her other needs, which led to high inner tension. Outside work, she is usually exposed to social conditioning and does not express her opinion, feeling she does not know enough about the topic. The reason is that Sally has a social conditioning barrier, which prevents her from saying something that can contradict others’ opinions. However, at work, she successfully used critical thinking to analyze the customers’ feelings and warranty terms to conclude that these terms are unjust and not customer-oriented.
Reason, Emotion, and Communication
Sally has clear reasoning and is almost unaffected by emotions; she seems to ignore them whenever possible. She shows a passive communication style with her colleagues outside the work, avoiding direct conflicts and confrontations and agreeing with all they say, no matter what she thinks. However, Sally is empathetic and successfully manages to analyze customers’ emotions and imagine herself in their situations, as with the customer who was unhappy with the printer that failed after one month of warranty ends. In that way, she successfully uses reasoning and analyzes emotions to make the correct conclusions and help people.
Fallacies and Argument
There is a prominent irrelevant reasoning fallacy of Sally’s managers, who blamed her for being late at work when she proposed a warranty extension. Sally’s argument was based on straightforward calculations: she analyzed many customers’ complaints and concluded that there are many cases when a printer fails after one month of warranty expiration. Thus, she concluded that extending the warranty from 12 to 18 months would be ethical and customer-oriented. However, her manager expresses an irrelevant reason that Sally is often late at work and, thus, she should not ask for it. It was not connected with the subject and, in addition, inappropriate and rude. Therefore, Sally terminated the conversation and managed to meet with leadership, eventually achieving her goal successfully: the warranty was extended.
Conclusion
Therefore, Sally can successfully use critical thinking at work but has problems with it outside work, primarily due to overload and introversion. She is shy and does not like to engage in active discussions, so she prefers to avoid anyone with whom she can potentially have conflicts. The woman avoids emotionally charged situations and does not answer provoking or aggressive questions, such as the one from her manager. She terminates conversations in these cases, searching for other ways to solve the problem. However, Sally is empathetic, and the situation when she successfully imagined herself in the customer’s position demonstrates it.