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

It is human instinct to sort and categorize. According to Professor Kevin Dutton a psychologist at the University of Oxford we are hardwired to discriminate and frame everything in binary black and white. Its how our brains work. Migrant or refugee? Muslim or Christian? Them or us? Rather than reaching out to those who are different we bond with those who are similar to ourselves. Rather than challenging our own thinking about the world we endeavour only to confirm what we believe.The result is that the difference between polarized beliefs becomes ever greater. Dangerous possibilities arise. The Arab Spring. Brexit. Trump. Through persistent binary thinking our capacity for rational thought - seeing the grey rather than merely black and white - begins to erode. Black and White Thinking is an alarm call. Amidst a rising tide of religious intolerance and political extremism it argues that by understanding the evolutionary programming of our binary brains we can overcome it make sense of the world and in future make much subtler - and far better - decisions. Review Dutton provides simplifying clarifying and essential insights into the character of human choice and decision-making. Youll not think about thinking the same way afterwards. ―Robert Cialdini author of INFLUENCE and PRE-SUASIONKevin 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 PullmanKevin Dutton is a Special Forces style psychologist. Daring. Original. All-action. No nonsense. ―Sir Ranulph Fiennes About the Author Dr Kevin Dutton is a researcher at the Department of Experimental Psychology University of Oxford and a member of the Oxford Centre for Emotions and Affective Neuroscience (OCEAN) research group. He regularly publishes in leading international scientific journals and speaks at conferences around the world. He is the author of the acclaimed Flipnosis: The Art of Split-Second Persuasion.