Do you tend to think in "Black and White"?

Post Reply New Topic

Nope, in fact I think grey areas and ambiguity are very important.

IMHO, right and wrong are nothing more than historical and social constructions.

Black and white , like how the Communists and religious people do. I don't see it that way. However I do find it easier to attack someone when they are clearly doing wrong, and I don't care if they have a gun.

I'm going to post a second time here:

I think in black and white when I'm really angry. Like now.
l
l
l
V

I agree with Speedy.

I need the world around me to be easily categorized and organized. Machines, computers, the sciences, are all about measureable traits. I am comfortable with those things.

Emotions are confusing because they do not clearly fit into a rigid structure.

I guess admitting that I think only in black and white or denying that I do would be black and white thinking in and of itself, right?
I don't know, I find this topic rather confusing, as I do most generalizations about ASD. It's easy to remeber times when I have been this way, but if I can think of a time when I wasn't, does that negate all the other times? Or is there a proportion that is considered normal up to a certain point? See, I look at things from so many different angles it's disorienting. I guess that makes me often a gray thinker, although without specific example, I can't really say how much so or how often.

I can't think in black and white terms. Everything is a haze of grey, with no noticeable gradient in tones to guide me. No right, no wrong. It's Hell.

Do you see the irony in that statement?

I tend to react to things with black/white thinking, but thanks to Speech/Debate in high school when I really think things through I get past that.

The 'concrete thinking' was one supposed criterion for Asperger's Syndrome that I had a hard time understanding. As my screen name implies, I tend to hold ideas that are kind of grey, and I can sort of alter my perspective on things and see things differently if I need to. When it comes to practical matters, though, I'm basically a robot.

My psychotherapist frequently reminds me that I often give myself polar extreme options. You know, dating didn't work this time so I'll never date again. She considers that to be black and white thinking (or thinking in black and white - semantics?)

I may be wrong, but don't all children start out with black and white thinking? Then, over time, grey develops? Perhaps some of us are developmentally stuck at that child-like level.

Z

Yes, but I try to focus whatever 'it' may be, at it's simplest level so really there is only black and white.


I dont really understand what people mean exactly by grey thinking.
It seems too subjective to me because they cannot accurately describe it, but I always find it a little funny that their descriptions/understandings seem to be very general, which I equate to grey.


Currently I see it all as a level of zoom (like a camera), at face value it's grey, but it is made up of lots of little black and whites (much like pixels on a TV).

I am quite prone to black-and-white thinking at times. I also have a distaste for ethical and cultural relativism.

I don't think I do now. Pretty unanimously everyone who knew me agrees I did (extremely) when I was little though.

Black and White as in good vs. evil, or true vs. false, or all vs. nothing or objective vs. subjective? There are many kinds of black and white thinking, which one are we talking about?

The difficulty which some autistics have related to black-and-white thinking, as I did when younger, relates to problems seeing gray areas. I suppose it could apply both to truth claims and to ethics.

Interesting to me is that, in conversations, I am usually the one pointing out ambiguity, while others "accuse" me (and correctly so) of being a postmodernist.

I have had exactly that happen more times than I count. Not the postmodernist stuff but some reaction or other that displays impatience with my pointing out ambiguity.

I wonder if my preference for concrete data makes such ambiguity very prominent for me in a way that may not be common among NT's. I ignore or miss big picture issues and see the nuts and bolts of a statement, which may have ambiguities that have been skipped over in the non-verbal communication. So an NT would think that they have communicated a very unambiguous message considering the non-verbal and other implied stuff while I would be sitting there hearing Just The Facts..

I think all this points out how TOTALLY ambiguous the phrase black and white thinking is.