Eggs are bad for you, Nazis, and Binary Thinking

After a quick walk around the park, I come back to my apartment, make some breakfast and read a few pages of Think Again by Adam Grant. Adam is an organizational psychologist who became very popular in the last couple of years, especially after his famous TED Talk: The surprising habits of original thinkers. He's a great writer and shares very insightful tweets about life, work, and other subjects. I'm currently reading his 8th chapter in which he deals with difficult conversations. If you know me, you're probably aware that I'm a sucker for anything psychology and philosophy, mainly cognitive biases and logical fallacies. This chapter reminded me of two situations, one that happened to me recently and another that happened last year to a famous podcaster. Let's start with the latter.

Podcasts are on the rise everywhere and some can actually reach millions of people. That was the case of Flow, a podcast run by two Brazilians on different topics with some quite notorious guests: celebrities, businesspeople, congresspeople, and other politicians, you name it! One of its episodes brought together two opposing congresspeople to discuss politics, economy, and freedom. That's when it happened. During the discussion of what can be considered freedom, one of the hosts, Monark, said he thought people should have the freedom to create a Nazi party in Brazil. Immediately after that, Tabata Amaral, the congresswoman on the show, said that no group that threats the existence of certain groups of people should be allowed to officialize that agenda. It's a crime and most people know it - at least I hope.

Monark got canceled by many people and was forced to leave the podcast. He has never truly apologized for what he said and defended his right to speak his mind in the name of freedom of speech. He's now running another podcast. I watched one of the episodes of his new podcast with a Brazilian expert in China and communism, prof. Elias Jabbour. Many left-wing people were invited but refused to participate in Monark's new show because of the repercussions of what he says. I wanted to watch Elias because of the inherent conflict I expected to witness and, I must say, it was truly educational.

Elias, as any good professor and researcher, told Monark that people should base their assertions on scientific facts. Freedom of speech on platforms that reach millions of people based on fallacies - or hate speech disguised as freedom of speech - can do a lot of harm. Then Monark said something that relates even more directly to Adam Grant's chapter 8. He said that people use science to make fallacious claims and propaganda. He mentioned that scientists keep changing their mind about eggs. There was a time eggs were bad for you but now they're good for you.

What does that have to do with Adam Grant's book? In chapter 8, he talks about something called binary bias. We tend to make quick judgments, labeling and categorizing everything we encounter in a superficial and dichotomous way. This can lead to certain distortions of thought, the so-called cognitive biases. He mentions how we're more likely to push people into survival or defense mode when we "attack" their point of view with facts than actually convince them. He even brings up Al Gore's documentary The Inconvenient Truth about climate change and how people haven't really changed their minds in over a decade. And many watched it.

The most interesting example Grant used to illustrate his point is a study about the health effects of coffee. It suggested that individuals who consumed one or two cups of coffee daily had a lower risk of cognitive impairment compared to those who didn't drink coffee at all. However, the study also found that individuals who consumed more than two cups of coffee a day had a higher risk of cognitive impairment. In spite of these nuanced findings, media covering (news articles, headlines, and TV news) the research oversimplified the results. Based on the same dataset, different news outlets reported the findings either in a negative or in a positive way regarding its effects on the brain.

What can that tell us about having difficult conversations? Polarized and, thus, dichotomous opinions tend to push people away no matter how "right" they are. Facts do not convince people, especially if they're used to not being challenged or to having their privileges questioned. It also tells us something incredibly important about our brains: we are naturally inclined to oversimplify things. Binary bias has to do with our tendency to split any given set of data we're exposed to into just two categories, without considering any of the nuances or complexities that may exist. Just think about social media! It has recently happened to me and that's the other situation I promised to discuss.

You may have seen that one of my Instagram posts got quite a lot of attention. It was about native-speakerism, that is, the ideology that native speakers of English, particularly Americans and the British, are better role models as teachers when compared to non-native speaker teachers. The first reason in my Instagram carousel for why native-speakerism is a fallacious belief was:

Native speakers are the world's worst communicators

A lot of people got offended, mainly native speakers. I had simply copied the headline of a BBC article that reflected the opinion of experts in the field and actual research findings. In other words, it was not my claim and it was substantiated by evidence - and context-based. However, for anyone to understand that, they had to know the research in English as a Lingua Franca, Bilingualism, and Linguistics, as well as terms like translanguaging, heteroglossia, and dynamic bilingualism. They also had to know that monolingual native speakers of English without teacher training are not teachers and no one should choose someone to teach them professionally anything if they are not qualified. Period.

So basically, what I'm saying is that I may have triggered some binary thinking because of that headline. I myself may have thought binarily when I chose to share that as the number 1 reason why students and schools around the world should not choose based on nationality. Some of the people who propagate native-speakerism felt a lot less compelled to have a conversation with me after they felt I was "attacking" their point of view. At least that's what research shows according to Adam Grant.

Certain topics like stopping Nazis should be self-evident to everyone, but they aren't. Nazis want to exterminate other human beings based on their ethnicity and appearance. How much more information do you need to decide if that's good or bad? Eggs being good or bad for you, well, that depends on variables like your genome, the number of eggs you consume etc. People who simply speak the language are not teachers. Teachers need qualifications. The problem is that because we have this tendency to hold dichotomous beliefs - some people choose A and other people choose B - it's more likely to strengthen people's positions when we try to educate them with facts.

Nobody is invulnerable. We all fall prey to biases. It can be very hard to listen to "the other side of the story" when we are convinced. That's why we need to listen to Elias Jabbour's recommendation. It's not his recommendation actually. It's science and the scientific method. We first need to acknowledge that things are far more complicated than what our brains would like. The overwhelming amount of information we're bombarded with every day can turn us into lazy thinkers who just accept everything at face value. Question social media posts and headlines.

We also need to be ready to change our minds when new studies are published or when experts raise new questions. It's important to remember that we're often blind to our own ignorance. We don't always realize how little we know, and we're not really designed to understand the extent of our own limitations. As José Saramago, a Portuguese writer said:

You have to leave the island in order to see the island

We also need to be open to dialog. There's nothing I love more than having an interesting conversation that makes me rethink many of my ideas. I spent quite a lot of time answering people who left comments on that Instagram post I shared on LinkedIn. Our educational system needs to prepare our students to discuss their ideas with others and to use science as an ally. We'll make incorrect or incomplete assertions now and again, sure, but if we're truly committed to the scientific method and to dialogs, we can refine our ideas and overcome contradictions.

However, I do have the obligation to say something. It's about privilege. People like Monark are extreme cases but they do exist. They propagate ideas that can be harmful to underprivileged people. In his case, ideas that can get people killed or hurt. We are capable of such blindness. We sometimes defend ideas based on our perceived notion of how the world works that can cause less harm, but harm still nonetheless. Our brains are sort of programmed to perceive challenges to our beliefs as threats and that relates to binary. However, we can take the "attack" as an opportunity to rethink our position and to get better informed, and have an actual conversation with someone who thinks differently.

We listen to views that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard

After all, the purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs

Adam Grant