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Information Literacy: Be Savvy about your Sources: Know your weaknesses

Information-savvy: Having a shrewd understanding of how to deal with information. Alternative descriptions: "Information Competency" or "Information Fluency"

Common Cognitive Distortions

1. All-or-nothing thinking: You restrict possibilities and options to only two choices: yes or no (all or nothing).

2. Over generalization: You view a single, negative event as a continuing and neverending pattern of defeat.

3. Negative Mental filter: You dwell mostly on the negatives and generally ignore the positives.

4. Discounting the positives: You insist your achievements or positive efforts do not count.

5. Jumping to conclusions:

  • a. Mind-reading: You assume that people are reacting negatively to you without any objective evidence.
  • b. Fortune-Telling:You predict that things will turn out badly without any objective evidence.

6. Magnification or minimization: You blow things way out of proportion or minimize their importance.

7. Emotional reasoning: You base your reasoning from your feelings: "I feel like a loser, so I must be one."

8. "Should/must guilting: You criticize yourself or other people with "musts," "shoulds," "oughts," and "have tos."

9. Labeling: Instead of saying "I made a mistake," you tell yourself "I'm an idiot" or "I'm a loser."

10. Personalization: You blame yourself almost completely for something for which you were not entirely responsible.

An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments: Logical Falicies

Bad arguments book cover
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