Black-and-White Thinking Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Black-and-White Thinking

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Zusammenfassung von Black-and-White Thinking

Name: Black-and-White Thinking
Rating: 4.5 (284 reviews)
Author: Kevin Dutton

Kevin Dutton

The Burden of a Binary Brain in a Complex World

4.5 (284 Bewertungen)

23 Min.

Themen

The Brain Anthropology Change & Evolution

Inhaltsübersicht

Black-and-White Thinking
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What’s in it for me? Understand how and why our brains categorize the outside world.

A multitude of categories exists all around us –⁠ in movies, music, and even gender. Head to Netflix, for instance, and you can choose from 76,000 different movie sub-genres –⁠ everything from “Psycho-Biddy” to “Sea Creatures Playing Sports.”

You might think that having so many options is a good thing. But in fact, too many alternatives can quickly overwhelm your brain. Similarly, having too few choices is a path to stereotyping, hatred, and militancy.

The key to navigating the world is in finding a balance between the two –⁠ neither an excess nor dearth of categories. These blinks uncover the reasons why we categorize, how we do it, and when it leads us astray.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

when a mountain becomes a molehill;
why hoarders just can’t throw stuff out; and
the power of the word “we.”

Evolution gave humans the gift of categorization.

You probably don’t remember when exactly you started categorizing the things around you. That’s because categorization is a skill humans learn at an early age. Very early, in fact.

In a 2005 study, developmental psychologist Lisa Oakes showed pictures of cats to a group of four-month-old infants. The cats were shown two at a time, and each pair was on screen for 15 seconds. First, Oakes would show six pairs of cats; then, she would add a new picture to each pair: either a new cat or a dog.

The result? The infants spent more time looking at the dogs than the unfamiliar cats. That’s because the infants saw the dogs as a new category. So their brains were processing the dogs differently and adding them to a brand-new grouping. If this study is any indication, our brains are designed to categorize.

The key message here is: Evolution gave humans the gift of categorization.

When we’re born, the world is a confusing swirl of sensations that can be difficult to make sense of. That’s where categorization comes in. Categories help us sort the mess into more easily understood, meaningful piles.

Just imagine what life would be like if you couldn’t form categories. Say you walk into a friend’s backyard. She has a sprinkler on the ground –⁠ but your brain isn’t aware of the category “watering device.” Immediately, you start to wonder what that object is. Is it dangerous? Could it kill you? Living like this would be impossible.

Clearly, categorization is still very important today. But it was even more so for our ancient ancestors.

A rustle in the bushes, a shadow on the wall, a ripple on the water –⁠ any of these things could have spelled death. We needed categories to help us recognize survival threats. And our brains gave us the binary distinction of fight versus flight.

Next, evolution equipped us with two other major binaries: us versus them and right versus wrong. Both of these were meant to increase social cohesion. Us versus them led us to favor those in our in-group over our out-group. And the idea of right versus wrong reinforced group solidarity, discouraged self-interest, and helped resolve conflicts.

Categorization helped our ancestors survive. But in the modern world, it frequently gets us into trouble – as we’ll see in the next blink.

Gray areas are everywhere – and they can be tough to navigate.

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.

People may categorize things too narrowly or too loosely.

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.

People lie on a spectrum from cognitive closure to cognitive complexity.

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.

Tribalism distorts our perception of reality.

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.

Extreme language leads to extreme thinking.

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?

Framing is a powerful tool of persuasion.

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.

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Worum geht es in Black-and-White Thinking?

Black and White Thinking (2020) examines the human brain’s irresistible impulse to sort things into binary categories: black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. The instinct to categorize is strong –⁠ and we have evolution to thank for it. But while categorization helped us survive in ancient times – when every trip into the forest was life or death – it’s become an obstacle in the modern world. Today, life’s rarely black-and-white, but often shades of gray.

Wer Black-and-White Thinking lesen sollte

Anyone fascinated by the human brain
People who love to pick apart the intricacies of language
Those who want to think more clearly in their daily lives

Über den Autor

Kevin Dutton is a British psychologist who specializes in the study of psychopathy and persuasion. He’s a researcher at the University of Oxford and the author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths and Flipnosis: The Art of Split-Second Persuasion.

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