the pursuit of love and love in a cold climate

Sometimes, people divide the spectrum in asymmetric ways, with one side much larger than the other.

This mental labor-saving device is practical in many everyday situations, but it is a poor tool for understanding complicated realities - and the climate is complicated. Some changes aren’t a simple binary choice. But when that spectrum is polarized into pairs of opposites, choices are clear and dramatic. When people face a spectrum of possibilities and nuance, they have to exert more mental effort. People are often susceptible to it because in many areas of life, dichotomous thinking does something helpful: It simplifies the world.īinaries are easy to handle because there are only two possibilities to consider. As I explain in my book “ Finding Goldilocks,” black-and-white thinking is a source of dysfunction in mental health, relationships – and politics. That mistake is the cognitive error known as black-and-white thinking, also called dichotomous and all-or-none thinking. The allure of black-and-white thinkingĬlose examination of the arguments made by climate change deniers reveals the same mistake made over and over again. Why are so many people susceptible to this type of disinformation? My field, psychology, can help explain - and help people avoid being misled. That year became the hottest on record and has since been surpassed. James Inhofe brought a snowball to the Senate floor in February 2015 to argue that because it was cold enough to snow in Washington, D.C., climate change wasn’t real.

The pursuit of love and love in a cold climate