Does chess develop "critical thinking" etc. (away from the board)?

"Does chess develop critical thinking or do people who enjoy critical thinking also enjoy chess?"

I don't see why they can't both be true to some extent.

Oh, right. I would agree with that then.

To improve in chess, you must be a critical thinker. Chess can be used as a vehicle to practice critical thinking--but you have to be a critical thinker first.

This website is a great place to begin: http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/critical-thinking-where-to-begin/796

These series of lectures on You Tube concerning CT are outstanding: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpyvWfo9diMIMi_wX5LUbSQ

OldChessDog, thank you for continuing this investigation ...
for me it is about developing opportunities to explore All Levels of cognitive abilities.
Please listen to this:
https://db.tt/8aBvLOAs

and then join me at the forum:
http://www.chess.com/groups/forumview/audio-welcome-here--share-the-substance?lc=1#last_comment

thanks for moving the process along.

Chess is a game. A game of decisions and consequences. Life is the same, but without a fixed aim and without clear rules.

Hello. Can you please join the learning center? We have 1 hour lectures with affordable prices for under $20. We have: GM Yaroslav Zherbukh, IM Valeri Lilov, IM Devan S, and more!! Please join here: http://www.chess.com/groups/home/the-learning-centre

Please stop using these vague, amorphous examples like "goal setting" and similar. Goal setting in chess happens over the course of less than an hour, and is nothing like goal setting in real life. The fact that both chess and life have goals is an extremely weak connection to make.

People take whatever they are knowledgable about and think it mirrors life. Stamp collectors think stamp collecting is a microcosm of life. Chess is not special in this regard.

If chess were some special thing that taught us about life, then if we changed the rules, it should no longer teach us about life. But that's not true. If we change the way a knight moves, then we should have something different that is no longer an accurate metaphor for life. But that's not the case. Chess with different knight moves would just be another game, and people would still say it teaches us about life. If it's true, then any game teaches us about life and there is nothing special about chess.

Just because you are unable to see the connections does not mean they don't exist.

The personal skills you can develop in chess have nothing to do with the moves. It is all about creating useful thought processes. Winning at chess is ALL ABOUT building good habits. And so does life.

Sure, I would agree that chess skills cannot be the grounds for changing your life or even teaching you things that will guarantee success in life. But to ignore that chess can teach you skills that can can be applied to ones life and grown to a useful level shows a lack of understanding of both the deep fundamentals of chess and the human mind.

ANd, if you believe your deep interest and pursuit in chess has not changed you as a person, then I would say you really don't know or understand much about yourself.

That's funny, I disagree with you and I don't "lack understanding of the fundamentals of chess and the human mind." I'm also very aware of how things affect me (and others), and chess has had little to no effect on me and most others I have encountered (away from the chessboard).

If there were more chess players in the world, the world would be a better place, not perfect, but better.

Well, again, I would say that just because it does not have an effect on you does not mean it cannot have an effect on others.

As I stated earlier, I personally have used skills from chess to improve myself. So, therefore, it must be possible.

Inevitably the connections will be vague if they're general. I don't see how that compromises their existence. Lots of outer space is, unfortunately, not visible to us on Earth, yet it exists just as well -- inconvenient that we can't put it in an experiment, but again it exists just as well.

So I guess to summarize I don't agree that vagueness is necessarily so bad, it's just that it can be used in really bad ways. That's why I am sceptical when I argue that something mirrors life. Nonetheless, there are some arguments that I still find reasonable even after I am sceptical. Those are the ones that I keep. Ideally we would want controlled experiments for anything we want to prove, but without those, using some careful, sceptical judgment can be better than nothing. I don't make my conclusion lightly; I think about a lot of counter arguments, such as the ones brought forth here. And it's possible I'm wrong, but all I can do is make the best justifications I can.

Haha, you feel like posting the fact that you disagree but not the reason -- taking the easy way out huh :)

I've already given plenty of reason.

If you think about it though, what then does train our general skills? Must we take a class for each and every general skill? It seems like when we do specific things this involves certain general skills, that surely would be built up as a result of doing those skills.

I mean if specific skills didn't improve general skills I doubt we could learn much even after decades of living, given that most things we do are specific.

This is very true. The human mind grows holistically. Meaning it takes in and processes knowledge not directly realted to what it already possesses and makes it a part of its own knowledge and skills.

And repeated exposure to a process, as Mark mentioned, does a lot to shape the mind. If this were not true, then each time you played chess, you would be back to square 1 with your skill. (or maybe A1 to keep it chess related.).

I will concede that, compared to being in a coma, chess does help you develop some life skills. I guess my point is, you can say this about ANYTHING. Playing Candy Land and playing with a stick also develops some life skills, for a 3-year-old. But no one says Candy Land or playing with a stick are important for developing life skills. So if all you are claiming is that chess is better than nothing, then that is true, but it seems like a really pointless claim because it's true for almost anything in life.

In the process of improving at chess I have learned a lot about how to learn, but chess had little to do with that. In fact, I think chess probably clouded learning this topic, because so much of it is chess-specific and not transferable to learning other things.

Here is another way to think of this. If you were in charge of a school, would you have the kids play chess? People say chess teaches kids about winning and losing, gives them self confidence, and so on. Okay, maybe those are true compared to having the kids stare at a blank wall. But for every skill chess teaches them, there are 100 ways you can teach them the same skill more effectively. The primary skill they learn by playing chess is, playing chess.

Exactly.

There are far better pedagogical tools for developing critical thinking, reasoning, etc. than chess. The vast majority of what you learn playing chess becomes irrelevant once you leave the chess board.

I am not sure if chess helps to develop critical thinking but for sure it trains you to think precisely and to check all possibilities.  

If the calculations you do in chess are faulty or superficial you immediately get punished by your opponent. If you play against a strong opponent even a small inaccuracy may be enough to lose a game. Wishful thinking and speculative resp. dubios play are also punished on the spot.

I think chess provides quite a good education to think and calculate precisely also in other parts of your live.

So, since you calculate different chess lines, you also calculate all your possibilities in real life situations?

lol.

"If I move here, that person will move here. I am winning."