Black and White Thinking vs Nuanced Thinking

We humans tend to think in binaries, that's how our natural instinct is, that's how its comfortable. Thinking in terms of "either this or that" is what I call "Black and White thinking". But more often than not, binaries don't work. they are cancelled by fractions between 0 to 1 that can some times be infinite.

On the other hand is what I call "Nuanced thinking". Each thinking tangent or a topic has a spectrum of big ideas and then within those big ideas there are some times fully conflicting and opposing nuances that can give a totally opposite meaning to the said big idea. This leads to much more complexity and uncertainty . Now guess what? , Uncertainty is the one of the most common reason , we humans are very bad at Nuanced thinking and tend to follow the black and white thinking pattern to conserve energy and stay in the comfortable lane.

The Problem

Very few problems has solutions derived from only binary way of thinking i.e. Black and White thinking. Human nature and so are our problems much more complex than a either right or wrong answer. It can be often varying percentages of rights and wrongs and no defined final solution to an apparently simple problem. This uncertain spectrum of all sorts of conflicting ideas is what i call the Gray area. Gray area is where Nuanced thinking works and is optimized on.

Let me explain with an example:

Suppose we are considering a problem of marriage or any type of heterosexual relationship. A very binary way of thinking would be that either a person is good or bad to marry for another good or bad person. Now this approach demands all the traits and actions of the said person to belong in one and only one box and vice versa. You can see how this would lead to a ton of complex and disastrous problems in the relationship. This wouldn't be even feasible for human generation to survive long term.

In the Nuanced approach, we will have to accept the uncertainty and become uncomfortable for a while. We have to move slow and read the whole spectrum of a person's intentions, manners and actions in order to make a decision about them as a long term partner. As a human , we have an instinctive bias toward skipping the uncomfortable long process of reading nuances and arriving on a result as quickly as possible to save the maximum energy. Its understandable but now we as a species have arrived at a stage where saving personal energy shouldn't be the main concern to survive long. Also, we now have more developed and informed conscious brain to surpass this energy saving barrier and dive deep into Nuanced thinking for making all types of important decisions.

So in our relationships example, the latter approach has maximum potential return on time and energy because of the reasons like more knowledge about the spectrum of rights and wrongs (no matter how you define them personally) about a person, having more empathy with the other person in terms of shared human nature and thinking biases and similar other reasons.

Black and white thinking often tries to put things in a box, which only works for things that CAN be put in to box . but what about things belonging to multiple boxes? Or the things that need new boxes?

Any significant human problem is a spectrum rather than a binary, like our relationships example, many other important human decisions require a knowledge of nuances and fractions between 0 and 1 of a problem.

In Defense of Black and White thinking

We have to apply the Nuanced thinking here too. Above explained potential positives of nuanced thinking doesn't mean that the binary way is useless and should be discarded. But it has to be applied with a grain of wisdom first.

Some problems require a quick and definitive template solution to minimize the upfront requirement of thinking before solving every instance of it. Binary thinking comes in handy here because it minimizes the energy requirement and provides a template to be followed.

But adding nuance here, each solution template has to be customized before application by considering all the possible spectrum and gray areas in the required problem being solved. Hence Nuanced thinking also comes in handy even after the binary approach.

For an instance, consider an example of defining rules for any sport like football (its not soccer lol!) , baseball or basketball etc , we need more black and white thinking to define fouls, scores, and bonus points because otherwise game might not reach a definitive end.

But this implies another conclusive point that Life and human nature are not definitive finite games. They are infinite muddy games with no definitive rules and results more often than not.

How to Start ?

My final task is to carry you from a binary way of thinking to more of a nuanced and practical way of thinking so you have tools to make better decisions in all important matters.

Problem awareness

Our gift of consciousness has given us tools to become aware of our own thinking biases and flawed patterns if enough effort is applied. Using that to become aware of what underlying patterns and biases are guiding any approach to a solution to a problem can be a good start in Nuanced thinking.

Moreover, having enough awareness of the problem, that you can define what boxes the problem can belong to or if it needs new boxes to reach to a potential solution.

Gathering real unbiased data

Data is the greatest tool to arrive closely to truth. But another difficult task is to find good data.

What is good data?

Good data is unbiased , random , and undirected data. For example data about cheating from a Tinder survey is not the representation of true reality of cheating in heterosexual relationships. More accurate data would be random interviews from streets, offices , homes from across the world without asking the direct question of "Are you cheating on your partner?" (which obviously would more often would be a "No" in the answer because humans hide such things).

So obtaining real, random and unbiased data is crucial to form the basis of Nuanced thinking.

Unlearning beliefs

The last step is to forget and unlearn all the pre-existing beliefs about the problem that can hinder the path to true working solution.

Beliefs are strange and scary. Unlearning them means you might have to take the risk of performing some actions that resulted in unfavorable circumstances in the past hence forming that belief. So true discovery of a working solution now requires a bit of courage and discipline to reach an end point in Nuanced thinking.

But you have to most of the times unlearn the said beliefs in order to un-blur the inconsistencies appearing in the collected data or reject the inefficient pre-existing solutions.

Final Word:

Lastly, I am inviting you to accept the uncomfortable and the uncertain and dive deep into nuances of all your problems.

Every time you encounter an important decision , ask yourself:

" What data I need and what biases I need to reject in order to arrive at truth?"