Unidimensional thinking. Why it is dangerous and how to avoid it
Unidimensional thinking — this is a phrase most commonly used in a preschool setting. I would know. My wife and I run a preschool. The phrase is Piagetian (although I’m not sure Piaget coined it). It refers to the type of thinking displayed by preschool-aged children. Children at this age tend to pay attention to only one facet of an object or situation, a “unidimension”. Their little brains are incapable of processing multiple facets simultaneously. Psychologists say that children, as they grow older, tend to overgrow this phenomenon.
I’m not quite sure that’s true.
Since the 2016 presidential elections, I have come to observe this phenomenon at an alarming rate in adults. At first, I was mildly amused and dismissed it as plain old stupidity, but when one of my closest friends displayed it, I was downright disheartened.
It was at a friend’s birthday party shortly after the 2016 elections. We were a group of close friends, having known one another for at least twenty-five years. We were at a point during the party where all we wanted to do was just sit around and chat with glasses of alcohol in our hands. Since we had just been through one of the most polarizing elections in recent memory, the topic this evening was naturally politics. We had recognized that different members of our group had different political leanings. We all had been OK with this for years. But, tonight was going to be different. Tonight, friends from over twenty-five years would fight, never make up, and part ways forever.
It started with child-like jabs at each other. This was a conversation mostly involving the men. The women, wisely, were having their own little conversations that had nothing to do with politics.
“Who did you vote for? Wait.. don’t tell me… a shameless skirt chaser like you would only vote for…
“….well, I would vote for your mother, but she can’t run anymore!”
That kind of wild, offensive, unfunny talk that men, regardless of how old they are, find humorous after sufficient quantities of alcohol has entered their blood stream. Usually harmless. Usually ending in a loud, raucous laughter. Usually forgotten that very night.
I had moved on to scotch. I had also politely stepped out of what was rapidly becoming a heated discussion. People were getting a little too passionate this evening. I didn’t like it, and I would not join in. I must have been in my second (or was it the third?) drink. I wasn’t keeping count. I think I was buzzed. The loud voices of my friends had started melding into one another. There was some music in the background. Sounded like the sitar… definitely music from the late 60’s… the right music for my state of mind!
“I want them all dead, you hear? Dead! Their entire kind should be wiped out!” The words cut through the ambient noise, drilled through my ears, reached into my brain and grabbed all my attention. I suddenly became very aware of Dave (not his real name). I had known Dave for twenty-six years. He has been one of my closest friends. This was Dave at his angriest. His voice was loud enough to break through my reverie. And my intoxication.
“Well, if they go after them, they’ll come after you too. You’re brown too — you know that, right? And they can’t tell the difference. They’ll come after you too because you look just like the people you want dead,” said another friend. Let’s call him Nick.
“That’s OK with me,” said Dave. If they shoot me, that’s collateral damage. I’m willing to die if it means their entire kind will be wiped out,”
“And what about you kids, huh? What about them?” asked Nick. He seemed shocked to hear Dave’s response to his earlier argument. I was too. Hard to believe, but it looked like I had sobered right up.
“What about them?” shot back Dave
“What if your kids run into one of them at the mall, at the bus stop? What if someone pulls a gun on your kids and because they are not able to tell the difference, because… you know… they are brown skinned too… and…”
“My kids… they’re collateral damage too. They don’t belong in this country anyway. This country needs to purge itself of all these people, and if my kids are part of the payment, then so be it! If my kids come to me saying someone pulled a gun on them, I’ll tell them to either deal with it or go back to where they came from!”
There was silence. I had never heard this kind of silence before. It nearly shattered my eardrums. No one said a word. Dave had two kids. His daughter was eight years old, and his son was six. Both were born in the United States.
“What did you say?” growled Nick. “How could you say that about your own children?”
“And where did your kids come from Dave? Huh?” Everyone spun around. That was my voice. Even I was surprised by it. I hadn’t see that coming. I hadn’t opened my mouth for a long time because I thought I was too drunk to talk. But here I was.
Dave, who should have stayed quiet, said in response not addressed to anyone in particular, “If you don’t like it, or anyone else here doesn’t like the way things are going to be, you can all go back to where you came from. You don’t belong here.”
There was a hushed silence. Nick stared angrily. He wanted to say something, but his wife was squeezing his hand. He looked at her. She looked him straight in the eye and shook her head. Nick took her unspoken advice and did what Dave couldn’t. He ended the conversation by simply turning around and leaving.
Dave was staring after Nick. His eyes were expressionless. Everyone just looked at each other, and slowly, in a matter of minutes, awkwardly thanked the host, and left.
Over the next few months, we tried hanging out together a few times. But something was different. Something felt broken. People spoke less and got more formal with each other. Nobody wanted to stay back after 9:00 pm. “Kids have baseball tomorrow.” “I have to pick up a cousin from the airport first thing in the morning.” “I have a call with my China office.” Excuses that were once meant purely for colleagues at work were now being bandied about in a gathering of lifelong friends on a Saturday night.
And what about Nick and Dave? It’s been well more than a year since the party. They haven’t met in person yet. Nick’s wife told me she didn’t want Dave coming to her house ever again. That was it.
Dave, who we had all known to be one of the more rational of people, had fallen prey to unidimensional thinking. He had developed an intense hatred for one particular ethnic group. His hatred was so severe, he had stated that the destruction of the ethnic group was more desirable to him than the safety of his own children.
The sad thing is that this kind of intense unidimensional thinking has permeated to other aspects of life as well. Now bear in mind, I’m not saying that the 2016 elections gave birth to unidimensional thinking. All I’m saying is that it facilitated unidimensional thinking and people have been finding it increasingly convenient to adapt this kind of thinking in other aspects of life as well. I have heard the following statement from an acquaintance of mine.
“I need to look cool in front of my friends. Nothing else matters!” The young man who said this is a fresh-out-of-college employee who is struggling to make ends meet. He was under tremendous debt and was constantly borrowing money from his retired parents. But that didn’t keep him from getting $100 haircuts or spending thousands on expensive clothing.
Or how about that father, another acquaintance of mine, who claimed that everything he was doing was for his family? He had quit his job a few years ago and joined a tech start-up. He has been working insane hours of late. Fun fact about this “family oriented” guy — when I asked him what grades his two kids were in, he said he didn’t know! He hadn’t had time to check in with them!
What happened here is a bit intriguing. He had a bigger goal in mind when he joined the startup company, and that was to ensure financial security for his kids. I genuinely believe that’s how he started. But somewhere along the way, unidimensional thinking too over. It became only about making money. He forgot his other fatherly duties. He stopped being there for his kids. It began in the form of a few missed performances of his kids at school. Then, it got a bit more severe. He stopped taking them to their soccer practices and helping them with their homework. Then it got even worse. He became absent at their special occasions like birthday parties. Now he doesn’t remember how old they are. Cats in the cradle all over again.
Unidimensional thinking is easy. You just focus on one thing and want that thing so badly that nothing else matters. Smart marketers, politicians, and confidence tricksters know this all too well. That’s how they’ve been influencing us all along. The term “unique value proposition” in marketing comes from an understanding that it’s enough if a product or service (or a person running for elected office) articulates value along just one dimension. That’s all people need. In fact, if more than one value proposition is used, the message is muddled and people get confused.
Is it wrong to think unidimensionally? In most cases, hell, yeah! Because that’s not how life works. Life seldom presents a choice where evaluating one dimension will automatically pave the way for an effective decision. Even simple decisions may require decision making along multiple dimensions. And the number of dimensions increase exponentially as the decision becomes more impactful. At least they should! Consider two examples below.
Purchase of a car - There are quite a few dimensions that a discerning car buyer needs to consider: cost, mileage, power, comfort, attractiveness, speed, reliability, size, color, safety features. But over and over, there is plenty of evidence that the primary thing people look for in cars are cup-holders!
Choice of a life partner - Ideally, the dimensions considered in this area should be way more, because one would hope that people make a decision based on prioritized list of parameters. Yet, upon speaking to quite a few of my friends and co-workers, it appears that single dimensions like looks or wealth are the only things evaluated in decision making (even though no one seems to admit it).
And what about unidimensional thinking in the workplace? Well, you’ll see a lot of that as well. Just because it’s a company, you can’t assume that decisions there are any more rational. It’s still people making decisions! An example that comes to mind is a company’s devotion to metrics. Oftentimes, it’s just one metric around which the entire company revolves. I worked for a company where the key metric that we were all chasing after was DAU (Daily Active Users). The problem was that this company made software for customer support. If more customers used their product for a longer time each day, my company was happier. But this also meant that something was going horribly wrong at the customer end if more and more people were on their company’s customer support system all the time!
Here’s what you can do if you catch yourself falling in the trap of unidimensional thinking:
This form of thinking is a knee-jerk reaction of the brain when you don’t let yourself think through consequences. The trick to avoiding it is to realize the interconnected nature of things. Nothing occurs in isolation. For example, driving fast may be pleasurable. But it is directly linked to breaking traffic laws and safety concerns. Chasing after your career goals is great. But that chase directly affects how much time you spend with your loved ones. With unidimensional thinking you’re trying to have your cake and eat it too. Unfortunately, the laws of nature seldom allow that. You need to broaden your mind and slow down, especially when it comes to more consequential decisions. Understand the different cause and effect relationships at play here. Pay heed to consequences of choosing one thing over everything else. That is the only way you can avoid the pitfalls of unidimensional thinking. But we don’t seem to be realizing that as a country. If we continue down this path, there could be serious trouble ahead.
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