Black-and-White Thinking summary

In the film The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain, a cartographer named Reginald Anson climbs up a mountain in Wales called Ffynnon Garw. Anson claims that the mountain is actually a hill since it doesn’t quite reach the height of 1,000 feet necessary to be considered a true mountain. When Anson reaches the top, he finds that, indeed, the “mountain” is short by 16 feet.

The villagers living near the mountain are incensed. So they climb up Ffynnon Garw and pile up a bunch of stones, sand, and dirt at the top. Lo and behold, the hill is now, mathematically, a mountain.

Do you have a hard time throwing out junk, mementos, and files you have in your house? In other words: are you a bit of a hoarder?

If so, your behavior might, in part, be explained by something psychologists call an underinclusive style of categorization. This means you create more categories in your head, but you include fewer items within each category. Hoarders often do this. They put each item into its own special category. That makes everything seem more unique, and harder to discard.

In the late 1940s, a psychologist named Else Frenkel-Brunswick conducted a study that quickly became a landmark of its time.

The concept was fairly simple. She showed participants a series of sketches. The first was a picture of a cat. The last was a picture of a dog. In between were cats whose features became progressively more doglike. Participants were asked to categorize each picture as either a cat or a dog.

If you’ve spent any time on social media, you’ve probably noticed the following phenomenon: people evaluate the truthfulness of a statement not based on factual evidence, but on whether or not it supports the values of their particular group. There’s a term for this: tribal epistemology.

Tribal epistemology was apparent in the wake of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. After the events, many politicians called for increased gun-control measures. Instead of simply disagreeing with those proposals, many people on the right-wing claimed that the shooting didn’t happen at all. They argued that the traumatized students and grieving parents were “crisis actors” hired to stage the events.

Think of the last time you felt mildly embarrassed in public. How would you describe that experience? Perhaps horrible, awful, or, like you wanted to die.

But did you actually feel like you wanted to drop dead right then and there? Or was the reality a bit milder? Maybe you just wanted to hide for a little while and forget what had happened?

In 2016, the UK held a referendum on the issue of Brexit –⁠ whether or not to withdraw from the European Union. The country was split into two camps: Leave and Remain. Ultimately, of course, Leave emerged victorious. What were the underlying reasons for that outcome?

A major factor may have been the Leave campaign’s use of linguistic frames. A frame is a particular way of talking about something –⁠ an angle or a lens through which to view an issue.