Critical Thinking and Decision Making Flashcards
7 cards from real FAST practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Critical Thinking and Decision Making flashcards as text
A team must decide quickly under time pressure with incomplete information. The best critical thinking approach is to:
Answer: Identify the most critical unknowns, make the best decision possible, and build in a review checkpoint
Effective decision-making under uncertainty involves identifying key gaps, acting on best available information, and creating a mechanism to course-correct.
Which of the following best demonstrates inductive reasoning?
Answer: Every project completed on Monday this year finished under budget, so Monday project starts tend to be cost-efficient
Inductive reasoning draws general conclusions from specific observations, though the conclusion remains probabilistic rather than certain.
A risk assessment rates an event as high-impact but very low-probability. The most rational response is to:
Answer: Develop a contingency plan proportional to the potential impact
Low-probability, high-impact risks warrant contingency planning — not ignoring or over-reacting — so resources are available if the event occurs.
An employee notices her team consistently attributes project failures to external factors (bad luck, poor client) but takes full credit for successes. This pattern is called:
Answer: Self-serving bias
Self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute successes to oneself and failures to external causes to protect self-esteem.
When evaluating an argument, which question is most useful for identifying a hidden assumption?
Answer: What must be true for the conclusion to follow from the premises?
Hidden assumptions are unstated premises the argument depends on; exposing them is key to evaluating argument validity.
A decision tree shows two paths: Path X yields $80,000 with 70% probability and -$20,000 with 30% probability. Path Y yields $50,000 with certainty. What is the expected value of Path X?
Answer: $56,000
Expected value = (0.70 × $80,000) + (0.30 × -$20,000) = $56,000 − $6,000 = $56,000.
Which of the following is the strongest evidence that a conclusion is well-supported?
Answer: Multiple independent, peer-reviewed studies consistently reach the same conclusion
Independent replication across rigorous studies is the gold standard of evidence, reducing the chance that results are due to bias or error.