The Black & White of Binary Thinking
(This article originally existed as a podcast episode. Click here to listen in 16 minutes.)
What is binary thinking and how does it affect our workplaces?
Growing up in this country we receive millions of messages from many different sources.
These kinds of messages shape our thinking and problem solving skills. We start seeing everything as falling into this or that category.
If only life were that simple!
These are examples of binary thinking, either/or thinking, which is something I am unlearning and trying to do less of when it comes to making decisions and how I perceive the world and people. I'm being more conscious of when I am engaging in binary thinking, and diverting myself to thinking on a spectrum of color rather than just black and white.
“Binary thinking, by definition, is thinking there are two sides, and you can only pick one. Also known as dichotomous thinking, this way of thinking becomes simple for us to process complex ideas and situations. The gray area in the middle of these complex issues is often ignored or goes unnoticed.” ~Clay Drinko, Lifehack article
And oftentimes it’s in those gray areas where magic exists, where the solutions are, where the truth is.
So why do we gravitate towards binary thinking?
Because we crave certainty, especially in today’s uncertain world.
And complexity can be scary and cause anxiety, so that’s why we want to categorize everything.
Another quote from the article: “Our brains take a shortcut to make us feel better, and we oversimplify things into general categories, resulting in binary thinking.”
So what’s wrong with binary thinking?
•It’s inaccurate, because gray areas DO exist!
•We are making assumptions, which are often inaccurate.
•Binary thinking leads to conflict and detachment.
How? If we are thinking in black and white, we are making assumptions about people and perhaps lumping them into a category. This prevents curiosity. Why ask questions when you already know the answer? Why get to know someone when you’ve already made assumptions about who they are?
How can this be problematic in our workplaces?
If we are making assumptions about people that we work with, that can lead to a slew of problems when we are assigning tasks, considering promotions, and just interacting with people in general on a regular basis.
Also, if we are faced with a challenge or problem at work and we think there are only 2 solutions, we may be ignoring a great solution that might be in the gray area.
What we can do instead?
Some Tips to Avoid Binary Thinking:
•Encourage curiosity: Ask questions. Encourage questions. Encourage critical thinking, in yourself and the team.
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•Experiment: You’ve heard me say multiple times in the past “but this is how we’ve always done it!” Continuing to do something for that reason alone is futile. Try something new. Shake things up!
•Practice empathy: Lead from empathy. Welcome humanity in the workplace. WE ARE NOT MACHINES!
•Make friends with uncertainty: This can be SCARY! Our brains favor certainty, so this might take some practice. The unknown is scary AND it can lead to wonderful things when we embrace uncertainty with courage.
Have you ever heard about the Dunning-Kruger effect? I hadn’t until I started researching for this podcast episode.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is when you know a little about a topic and are, therefore, overly confident about your expertise in that topic and you deem yourself an expert.
Then once you start to learn more, you realize how much you don’t know about the subject, and your confidence goes down.
Then once you do more learning and actually start to become an expert, your confidence goes up again.
These days with the internet, we are ALL experts on EVERYTHING! (that’s sarcasm y’all) We read one little meme on the book of faces or hear someone say something (which may or may not be true) and suddenly we are experts. I think we’ve seen a rise in this effect in recent years.
Critical thinking can help us avoid falling into the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Have you ever heard of the concept of “splitting?”
I came across this Forbes interview with psychologist Andrew Hartz titled Splitting: The Psychology Behind Binary Thinking And How It Limits A Diversity Of Opinions
In the interview Hartz says, “splitting is a defense mechanism in which people unconsciously frame ideas, individuals, or groups in all-or-nothing terms (e.g., all-good vs. all-bad or all-powerful vs. 100% powerless). It’s a widely used concept in mental health. “
Sounds synonymous to binary thinking, and I think it's something we've all engaged in.
Hartz explains that we tend to do this because we have an intolerance to ambivalence, or the experience of having conflicting emotions towards the same thing at the same time. This can cause anxiety, so we practice splitting, making the world seem simpler and easier for us to process.
BUT, there are long-term costs to this. It gives us a false sense of reality, which makes it harder to solve problems and predict events.
Splitting is emotionally dysregulating (which is when we can’t control our emotions), leading to aggression, psychic pain and mental illness.
It makes it more difficult to have productive dialogue with each other, it can impact our relationships and identity.
Hartz goes on to say, “There’s an Islamic mystic who described how harmful it is to divide people into groups, say only good things about some and only bad things about others. He said this brings ignorance, hatred, and chaos to societies. It’s a succinct description of the problem.”
Ignorance, hatred, and chaos… does that sound familiar?
You might recognize how this is showing up in our world and our workplaces and why it’s problematic.
Another reason why we may resort to binary thinking is that our brains are more impulsive under stress. Think about the collective trauma that we have been experiencing over the past few years and how that might correlate to our use of binary thinking.
When faced with decisions or perceptions, etc, practice thinking of things on a FULL SPECTRUM.
For example, if you are faced with a challenging decision and you feel like there are only 2 choices (this or that, black or white, right or wrong), picture the choices you have on a spectrum of color. And if you’re not sure what choices might exist in all of the colors, make a list of other possibilities. Get creative. Dig deep. Investigate the gray areas.
Explore the rainbow. It's always there, we are just conditioned not to see it.
I think to consider ourselves from an abstract perspective is to be self aware. So we create an invisible inner identity with which we reflect on matters for some level of perspective. Initially this creates a flow of feelings and emotions, then thoughts and ideas, as we develop language and an inner dialogue. As a result, binary thinking is inherent to this process. Me vs the other me, in every direction. In our attempts to be good not bad, we then try to embody one half of ourselves and suppress the rest (ego/shadow) and forget we are the ones imagining both those identities, to try and understand and control good vs bad.
We know that multiple things can be true at the same time.
Is the article good or bad? Sorry, can’t resist bad dad jokes!