The Binary Brain Sets Us Up for Bigotry and Discrimination

This part of my book I Think Therefore I Am Wrong: A Guide to Bias, Political Correctness, Fake News and The Future of Mankind seems particularly relevant at the moment.

"The combination of focusing on differences rather than similarities and the overlap between two concepts, PLUS the difficulty of weighting different individual contributions to the whole, means that the brain's default setting is to completely overvalue separateness and difference. For example, despite the fact that all humans are at least 99.5% the same genetically, we divide each other way more than we see our similarities. Part of the reason for this is that the brain works on contrast. It looks for ways to discriminate between stimuli, concepts and impressions and then overvalues those differences as a result. What this means is that we have to make a very conscious effort to avoid stereotyping and accepting and overvaluing simplistic binary brain perceptions.

The problem is that simple binary thinking works a lot of the time.

Think about the internal conversation you might have about what to have for dinner.

First, you think of several alternatives but quickly you narrow the choice down to two. Why? Because trying to make a choice out of five possibilities is way too difficult. You would have to make at least 10 comparisons of the different meals. You quickly switch into binary mode.

Now, that may seem like an adaptive tactic but there’s actually a big problem with it.

You are training your brain to seek binary simplicity.

 Fast forward to the next day. As an HR manager, you have to make a decision between two candidates. Of course, you have narrowed the list down to two not five because it’s so much easier to compare two people. The contrast effect highlights the tendency to see the differences rather than the similarities between two things when compared side by side, whereas when compared with several others, you are more likely to see their similarities. Indeed, you have used that process to narrow down the list.

Now the differences between the two candidates will stand out, no matter whether those differences are relevant or not to their ability to be effective employees.

One of the differences might be skin color. One person is yellow and the other person is blue. This is where you have to be really critical and careful.

Your brain seeing this skin color difference will then automatically present you with all the notions you have about yellow people and blue people. Some of these ideas you might not actually believe or even have thought about much, let alone validated. This is an example of the group attribution error, the biased belief that the characteristics of an individual group member are reflective of the group as a whole. In other words, all blue people are the same. You have to work hard not only to be conscious of these stereotypes but to actually fight them in your head.

Hopefully, future generations will be in disbelief that people were once discriminated on grounds of the color of the body’s largest organ – the skin. Probably some discerning children of the future will ask, “Back in the twenty-first century did they also discriminate based on the size of someone’s kidney or the shape of their liver?”