Black-and-White Thinking: Causes & How to Change It

What Is Black-and-White Thinking?

Early research explained that people can fall into automatic negative thoughts and thinking errors that can make reality feel more painful, hopeless, or threatening than it is.^[1] 

And later research that expanded on this finding suggests that these ways of thinking can impact relationships and functioning across all areas of life.^[2]

The rigid nature of black-and-white thinking tends to sort all, or most, of life into strikingly opposing categories. For instance:

• You are either “good” or “bad.”
• You have either “succeeded” or “failed.”
• Someone loves you or does not care at all.
• The day is “perfect” or “completely ruined.”
• You are “thriving” or “falling apart.”

The problem with this pattern is that most of life doesn’t operate in this way; things usually sit somewhere in the middle.

Symptoms of Black-and-White Thinking

Research suggests black-and-white thinking can’t be identified through a single “symptom.” Instead, recognizing this thought pattern happens by understanding someone’s repeated thought pattern. 

Tools used to measure this pattern consider how it shows up in three primary ways:^[3] 

1. Wanting clear either/or answers
2. Believing things can be split into two categories
3. Judging situations in terms of gain or loss

Aside from how the patterns show up, the emotional symptoms of black-and-white thinking usually manifest as: 

• Shame.
• Anxiety.
• Frustration.
• Feeling like one mistake means complete failure. 

In one study of 40 clinical participants, 111 athletes, and 101 students, dichotomous thinking was the strongest predictor of negative perfectionism.^[4] In another large language study on depression, all-or-nothing thinking was one of the cognitive distortions measured in online posts, showing how this pattern can sit alongside low mood and negative self-judgment.^[5]

What Black-and-White Thinking Looks Like in Real Life

In real life, black-and-white thinking can feel very certain, and it can play out in all sorts of unexpected, even seemingly mundane ways as we go about our daily lives. 

For example, if you have rigid thinking patterns, you might think that if you:

• Eat half a slice of toast, that you’ve failed your entire diet.
• Have a friend who takes longer than you expect to reply to an email, that they no longer care.
• Make a mistake at work, that you are terrible at your job.
• Have one difficult argument with your child, that you are a bad parent.
• Have a small fight with your girlfriend/boyfriend, that the relationship is ending.

While the circumstance might change, the pattern is the same each time: one piece of information colors the whole canvas. 

As well as affecting areas of life, such as work and academics, black-and-white thinking can be especially damaging to relationships. Relationships are never perfect; they have their ups and downs. So, rigid beliefs, like always seeing disagreements as bad, are often linked with relationship maladjustment.^[13] 

What we can learn from this is that some people are more prone to perfectionistic traits by their nature, but genes don’t paint the whole picture. Factors from our environment can still play a role, such as: 

• Criticism.
• Pressure.
• School.
• Culture.
• Trauma.

Parental Expectations

For some people, black-and-white thinking might have emerged in response to the high-pressure environments they grew up in. If you were raised believing mistakes were dangerous, embarrassing, or punishable, you could easily have learned to see performance in extremes. 

One well-known study identified concern over mistakes, high parental expectations, and parental criticism as key predictors of perfectionism and this thinking pattern.^[7] Another study found that dichotomous thinking was the strongest predictor of negative perfectionism across clinical participants, athletes, and students.^[4]