Black-and-White Thinking: The Burden of a Binary Brain in a Complex World

by Kevin Dutton

Overview

A groundbreaking and timely book about how evolutionary biology can explain our black-and-white brains, and a lesson in how we can escape the pitfalls of binary thinking.

Several million years ago, natural selection equipped us with binary, black-and-white brains. Though the world was arguably simpler back then, it was in many ways much more dangerous. Not coincidentally, the binary brain was highly adept at detecting risk: the ability to analyze threats and respond to changes in the sensory environment—a drop in temperature, the crack of a branch—was essential to our survival as a species.

Since then, the world has evolved—but we, for the most part, haven’t. Confronted with a panoply of shades of gray, our brains have a tendency to “force quit:” to sort the things we see, hear, and experience into manageable but simplistic categories. We stereotype, pigeon-hole, and, above all, draw lines where in reality there are none. In our modern, interconnected world, it might seem like we are ill-equipped to deal with the challenges we face—that living with a binary brain is like trying to navigate a teeming city center with a map that shows only highways.

In Black-and-White Thinking, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton pulls back the curtains of the mind to reveal a new way of thinking about a problem as old as humanity itself. While our instinct for categorization often leads us astray, encouraging polarization, rigid thinking, and sometimes outright denialism, it is an essential component of the mental machinery we use to make sense of the world. Simply put, unless we perceived our environment as a chessboard, our brains wouldn’t be able to play the game.

Using the latest advances in psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, Dutton shows how we can optimize our tendency to categorize and fine-tune our minds to avoid the pitfalls of too little, and too much, complexity. He reveals the enduring importance of three “super categories”—fight or flight, us versus them, and right or wrong—and argues that they remain essential to not only convincing others to change their minds but to changing the world for the better. Black-and-White Thinking is a scientifically informed wake-up call for an era of increasing extremism and a thought-provoking, uplifting guide to training our gray matter to see that gray really does matter.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374717759
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/05/2021
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	940,806
File size:	24 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Dr. Kevin Dutton is a research psychologist who has spent the best part of the last twenty years at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Kevin regularly publishes in leading international scientific journals and speaks at conferences around the world. He is the author of the acclaimed bestsellers Flipnosis: The Art of Split-Second Persuasion and The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, the latter of which saw him awarded a ‘Best American Science and Nature Writing’ prize and his writing included in an anthology of the same name. His work has been translated worldwide into over twenty languages and his writing and research has been featured in Scientific American, New Scientist, The Guardian, The Times, Psychology Today, The New York Times, The Wall St Journal, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Slate, USA Today among other publications. Alongside his academic commitments, Kevin also regularly consults in elite sport, business and military sectors.
Dr Kevin Dutton is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a research psychologist at the University of Oxford. He regularly publishes in leading international scientific journals and speaks at conferences around the world. He is the author of Flipnosis and The Wisdom of Psychopaths, for which he was awarded a Best American Science and Nature Writing prize. His work has been translated into over twenty languages, and his writing and research have been featured in Scientific American, New Scientist, The Guardian, The Times, Psychology Today, The New York Times, The Wall St Journal, and The Washington Post, among other publications.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 The Categorization Instinct 17

2 A Heap of Trouble 32

3 When Categories Collide 48

4 The Dark Side of Black and White 69

5 The Viewfinder Principle 87

6 The Complexity of Simplicity 111

7 The Rainbow That Might Have Been 131

8 The Frame Game 152

9 Where There's a Why There's a Way 188

10 Supersuasion 209

11 Undercover Influence: The Secret Science of Getting What You Want 232

12 Redrawing the Lines 262

Postscript: The Wisdom of Radicals 300

Appendix I The linguistics and perception of colour 313

Appendix II Assess your own need for cognitive closure 315

Appendix III A brief history of frames 317

Appendix IV Berinmo versus English colour space 320

Appendix V The three evolutionary stages of black-and-white thinking 323

Appendix VI Black-and-white thinking through the centuries 327

Appendix VII The essentials of essentialism 329

References 331

Acknowledgements 363

Index 365

Editorial Reviews

"With this book, Kevin Dutton, has provided simplifying, clarifying, and essential insights into the character of human choice and decision-making. You'll not think about thinking the same way afterward." —Robert Cialdini, Author of Influence and Pre-Suasion

"Kevin Dutton has the great gift of being able to see patterns in human behaviour . . . He talks about his discoveries, and about their implications for all of us, with the flair and clarity of a practised storyteller. Fascinating, important, and entirely convincing." —Philip Pullman

"Kevin Dutton is a Special Forces-style psychologist. Daring. Original. All action. No nonsense." —Sir Ranulph Fiennes

From the Publisher

2020-10-21
Why do we think in binary terms like “us versus them”? Research psychologist Dutton finds an answer in how our brains have—and haven’t—evolved.

Intentionally or not, the author, who has spent the last 20 years teaching at Oxford and Cambridge, puts his own spin on Malcolm Gladwell’s crowd-pleasing approach to pop psychology: dusting off scientific research, gathering anecdotes, reaching counterintuitive conclusions, and tossing in a dash of self-help. Dutton asserts that millions of years ago, the fight-or-flight response arose in response to perceived threats, and while the world has grown infinitely more complex, we’re still “programmed to think in black and white.” In order to navigate life, we mentally divide our experiences into manageable categories, giving them handy “frames.” Dutton argues that some cognitive “super-frames” are especially important. Along with “fight versus flight,” they include “us versus them” and “right versus wrong.” This cognitive trinity, he believes, helps to explain a vast range of polarizing events—e.g., Brexit, Trumpism, the rise of the Islamic State group. Those “super-frames” also hold the key to “supersuasion,” or “the secret science of getting what you want” from others. Casting a wide net, Dutton makes his case by drawing on research in neuroscience and other fields as well as on interviews with Tony Blair, Olympic gold medalist Sebastian Coe, transgender boxing manager Kellie Maloney, and others. That journalistic approach keeps the book from becoming dauntingly wonky but also serves as a substitute for a more rigorously scientific treatment that might have lent more plausibility to the author’s broad arguments and more weight to theories of “supersuasion,” which are no more compelling than those in many sales and marketing bestsellers. Gladwell’s detractors have often praised his storytelling and deft phrase-turning while faulting his tendency to oversell his theories and cherry-pick his academic studies. In Dutton’s book, many readers will find the same virtues and limits.

A theory about why people hold either/or views that’s more colorful than convincing.

Kirkus Reviews