Black and White Thinking: The burden of a binary brain in a complex world

by Professor Kevin Dutton

kittens or puppies –

‘See,’ she says. ‘I told you. People enjoy it when they have to make a choice. And, in the process, they go away happy.’ I nod. But I can’t help wondering about some of those other choices she mentioned. What other options were customers presented with when they came to settle their bills? She shrugs. ‘Apple or Microsoft,’ she says. ‘Spring or fall. Bath or shower …’

Take, for instance, in the cultural sense, black and white itself. Imagine that we were to stand all the colours of humanity in a line, from the blackest of the black at one end to the whitest of the white at the other, and were to make our way along it. At no definitive point as we negotiate its length would we be able to discern where a black person ends and a brown one begins. Or where a brown person ends and a tan one begins. Or where tan ends and white picks up the thread. In terms of skin colour, those standing shoulder to shoulder with each other would actually be all but identical. We’d be faced with a continuum of indeterminate intermediates. Black and white, in a racial or an ethnic sense, would simply cease to exist.fn2

An example: 62,000 people attended the dress rehearsal of the opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics but only a handful of those present leaked the contents of the show on social media. That’s pretty amazing when you think about it – especially in light of the pressures, expectations and temptations associated with modern-day download culture. Speculation abounds as to why this might’ve been the case but one theory is particularly intriguing. On the evening of the extravaganza the London 2012 artistic director, Danny Boyle, addressed the lucky attendees assembled before him in a hushed Olympic Stadium at Stratford’s Olympic Park and asked them not to ‘keep it a secret’ but rather to ‘save the surprise’. A trivial, insignificant detail? On first impressions, yes. But on closer inspection – if true – a flash of persuasion genius.

Fight versus Flight – Resist the temptation to spill the beans. Turn a deaf ear on the whisperings of human nature. We all like sharing secrets but no one likes spoiling a surprise. Us versus Them – Let’s keep this to ourselves until the big reveal, eh? We’re privileged insiders. We don’t want to admit outsiders to the club too early, do we? Right versus Wrong – How would you feel knowing that something you said not only ruined the big day itself but also all the effort and hard work that went into it?

works because the board is black and white. Life works because our brains are black and white. But wisdom lies in knowledge of the grey; in the deeper understanding that although, as cognitive grandmasters, we are destined to play the game, the squares on the board, indeed the very

We categorize the world at three different levels, he explains. Superordinate, basic and subordinate.

Sorites paradox

Life proceeds in grains. But our attention is drawn only to heaps.

Warren Quinn brought Eubulides and Weber face to face in a fiendishly ingenious paradox every bit the equal to Sorites: the Paradox of the Self-Torturer. Imagine that I have a portable device that enables me to apply an electrical current to your body in increments so tiny that you are unable to feel them. The device has 1001 settings: 0, which is ‘off’, and then 1 to 1,000 (excruciating pain). Now suppose that I attach you to the device with the dial initially set at 0 and offer you the following deal. You may keep the device for as long as you wish on one condition: that you turn up the dial just one single notch each week. For each turn of the dial you will receive £10,000 but you can never undo a turn and revert to an earlier setting. Finally, here’s the kicker. If, eventually, you find the pain too much to endure, you are nevertheless unable to relinquish the fortune that you have accrued and must continue to suffer the anguish for the rest of your life. Would you take me up on the challenge? You can see how the problem arises. ‘Reality’ tells you you’d have to be barking mad; that it will end, quite literally, in tears. On the other hand, however, Sorites casts its spell. No matter how many notches you ratchet up the dial, those grains of pain will never make a heap.

Often, problems arise and dangers accrue not too fast for us to notice, but too slow. So we need to draw lines to prevent things from going too far.

We are drawn, involuntarily and inexorably, to prominent, fully formed, incontrovertibly heaped conclusions. With potentially disastrous consequences. The world of our ancestors may well have been black and white. But the colour of now is grey. We draw lines to create contrast because it is through the stark juxtaposition of contrast that we see. But the greater the contrast, the lesser the finer-grained detail. And the lesser the detail, the greater the potential for ignorance and errors

Or consider the following scenario. A team of doctors battle to save the life of a premature baby born at twenty-three weeks while just a couple of doors down the corridor in the same hospital another woman is legally entitled to undergo an abortion on a foetus of the same gestation.

Let’s look at it another way. Does there exist, embedded deep within the template of our life span, some specially appointed hour, some solemnly significant day when a person who is categorized as ‘middle-aged’ suddenly gets categorized as ‘old’? Or when someone who is categorized as ‘young’ suddenly becomes ‘middle-aged’? Clearly not. Then why can’t we accept that the opposite might also hold true: that at no specific point along the spectral in-utero timeline does a collection of cells, a rash of genetic stardust, suddenly erupt into a fully fledged human being? The reason is because it matters. The life of the unborn is sometimes under threat. We are compelled to instantiate a hard, unconditional border between the categories person and non-person so that we can then introduce a further criminological airlock

The lives of the young, the middle-aged and the old, on the other hand, are equally protected under law. It is no less wrong to take the life of a fourteen-year-old than it is to take the life of a forty-four-year-old. Or, for that matter, even though they may be just as vulnerable as an infant or an unborn child, a 104-year-old. Once we are out of the womb age is of far less consequence. Relatively speaking, we’re safe. There are no Eubulidean aspersions as to the metaphysical status of our being. No Sorites-style decisions based on our number of cells.

him a quick tour of the residence. On entering the library, the plumber is dumbfounded by shelf upon shelf of haphazardly arranged tomes. He’s incredulous.

know. But instead I take him up on the offer to run me through the form. (If you wish to do the test yourself, my own – considerably shorter – variation of the scale is reproduced in Appendix II on p. 315.)

Frenkel-Brunswik discovered,

Surprised? Astounded, even? You shouldn’t be. Try the following exercise to see why. Below, you’ll find ten pairs of ‘black and white’ descriptors. These are regular, everyday words that most of us will use all the time. Copy the words out on to a sheet of paper and then next to each pair jot down a single word that accurately describes the grey zone between the two extremes. Some of them are easy. Some a bit more difficult. Here’s an example: ‘black’ and ‘white’.

possible answers. Well, if you’re not top or bottom you’re obviously in the middle. So no prizes for nailing that one. If you’re not good or bad then you might be described as mediocre. If you don’t take a large or a small then you might fit into a medium. If you’re not left or right then politically you might be a moderate. And if you’re not tall or short then you might be of average build. Did you get any of those? I’m sure you got one or two. But let’s just pause there for a moment and take a brief look at those five words. Middle. Mediocre. Medium. Moderate. Average. Not exactly inspiring, are they? In fact, in the worlds of PR and advertising they’re pretty much taboo. Another thing. Did you start to run into difficulty on the even-numbered pairs? If so then, again, you’re in good company. None of the students I tested could plug the gap between passive and aggressive or between rough and smooth with just the one, single word. Some of them couldn’t do it with a hundred. This is worrying. If there exists no expedient, readily available terminology in the English language to adequately describe the grey zone between certain pairs of black and white adjectives then, thanks to this linguistic famine, we are being forced to both speak and think in polarized, black and white terms. With unseen and far-reaching consequences.

horses Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has a story about Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts, the band’s drummer. One night, somewhere around the mid-eighties, Jagger dials the phone in Watts’ hotel room. It’s the early hours. He’s inebriated. And Watts is in bed. Watts picks up. ‘Is my drummer there?’ Jagger slurs. There’s a brief pause and then the phone goes dead. Jagger thinks nothing of it. Watts has other ideas. He gets out of bed. Then he has a shave. He puts on a suit, shirt and tie, and freshly polished

illusion, named after its originator, the American cognitive scientist Roger Shepard, ranks as one of the most extraordinary sleights of mind ever devised. Even when you know what’s going on it’s still pretty hard to get your head around it. So … what is going on? Well, incredibly, both of the tables in this drawing are the same size. Don’t

Art of Split-Second Persuasion. The book, as the title suggests, is about fast, on-the-spot influence as opposed to the more measured machinations of due process and negotiation. It’s not just about hitting the nail on the head, as I put it at the time. But about ‘flipping’ it the finger for good measure. The book became quite a hit with members of the UK military intelligence community, achieving something of a cult status among their ranks. I’m not surprised. Given the often acute time constraints inherent to the nature of the activities with which they are tasked, it was bang on the money. Not long after Flipnosis was published I had the pleasure of interviewing one of the world’s leading academic experts on persuasion, Professor Robert Cialdini, for a BBC radio documentary.