TEDxSalford

Cat or Dog? How Contrast Blows Our Minds

So. Are you a dog person or a cat person? Please, get comfy, and think about it for a moment.

Did you think about it? Well, even if you’ve just come down to here straight away, you are now in one of three camps.

Two of the camps are self explanatory – you picked dog (me), or you picked cat (my housemate) – but the third camp is a little different. Some of its members are contrarians, the people who just say ‘neither’ on principle. Some of its members are softies, the people who just say ‘both’ on principle. Some of its members are oddballs, the people who just say something different on principle. Each of them rejects the cat-dog division. And all of them are onto something big.

Like me, you probably think this is not a question deserving over 10 hours of investigation; but after the conversation which you have to have when you make an opposing choice from your housemate (“Oh yeah, I guess Jasper was a bit catlike for a dog”) you start to think there’s something a little bit off about the distinction. Perhaps cats and dogs aren’t such a contrast really… but this is nothing that really needs looking into.

Reader, I ignored this for question for four weeks. I had practically forgotten all about it when contrasts started showing up everywhere.

I was either a cat person or a dog person. I was either inside or I was outside. I was either hot or I was cold. I was either unintentionally listening to Katy Perry or I wasn’t unintentionally listening to Katy Perry. The only thing that didn’t seem so clear cut was the question to which all the signs seemed to point, and after trying to ignore it like a mad itch soon I caved and started scratching.

What’s the deal with contrast?

Like one of those threads in a natty jumper, this question started small before I realised the thread goes on for miles and miles; it’s like its all across your table, and it’s gotten in your laundry, in your soup, and it’s been there while you were in the a shower.

Contrasts might seem trivial, but often they exert a huge and unseen force on the way we understand the world around us. I’m hoping to make this visible to you too.

What is contrast?

For this article, we can think about contrast as a wide, and inclusive concept. Colours, words, entities, images, ideas and classifications – anything which can seem like it has a polar opposite. A few more examples might make what I mean more clear:

“Hey man, don’t buy the white car, buy the black car!”

“What goes up, must come down.”

“Are you a cat or a dog person?”

“Nah that’s too big, get something small.”

From these written examples, you can see that contrasts help us to communicate ideas. But when are they meaningful and when are they meaningless?  When are they useful, and when are they useless? Why do we compare cats and dogs?

To find out, we’ll be taking a look at ideas as different as Madding Irrationality, Sober Faced Philosophy, Fun Loving Art, and Serious Public Speaking; along the way we’ll see that contrast is prevalent everywhere in our everyday lives, and with a little bit more awareness that you’ll be able to discern both when it’s useful and meaningful to you, and when it’s hocus-pocus witchcraft, blinding you from what’s really going on.

Public Speaking

Cicero was a badass who, in literature, many people refer to as the master of the art of public speaking. His first century BC works are, to this day, read by businessmen, artists, political candidates and wannabes across the entire world.

Perhaps at the core of public speaking is rhetoric, a fuzzy term which has a heavy burden attached to it, in part because most of the time we hear the word it is only to discredit an argument.

A long time ago, rhetorical training was a core part of education which the medievals called the Trivium: Logic, Rhetoric and Grammar; these days we’re led to believe it’s mostly used by businessmen, politicians and esoterically-inclined scholars.

This isn’t true. Books about rhetoric hide in plain sight. You’ll find it in such books as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, and the trove of other self-help and people-management books. Anything that is designed to help you become more persuasive.

One facet of rhetoric is the effective use of figures of speech. Partly to intrigue and surprise, figures of speech get our attention and one of the most powerful is a contrast.

Any member of the TED viewing audience sees contrast in use all the time. Here are some examples, stripped of the speakers name just to show how they work on their own:

“How to live before you die”  

“What humans can learn from semi-intelligent slime”

“Can prejudice ever be a good thing?”

Each of these titles does a pretty good job of using either blatant contrast, like the first two, or subtle contrasts, such as the third. If you don’t quite already see it look closely: sat next to each other “Prejudice” and “Good Thing” might as well say “Bad Thing” and “Good Thing”.

So there’s our first clue about why we use contrast so much. For whatever reason, something in our minds just finds contrast interesting. And it’s not always totally logical.

Irrationality

Let’s face it, being rational all the time is tough work. The other day, I was in a shop and I bought expensive bottled water because really I wanted to feel like I’d made it in life. Okay that’s a lie, I didn’t do that. But I have no doubt that I’ve made plenty of purchases, and made just as many decisions, that were in some ways irrational. To my credit I think I’ve made plenty of rational ones too. I’m a human, not an ECON.

My dumb purchases aside, there are plenty of ways irrationality is actually harnessed and exploited using contrast. One particular trick, as Robert Cialdini cites in his book Influence, happens in sales.

Buying a new car? There’s a reason why all the add ons come right after, instead of before you make the purchase: when you’ve already laid down the cash for your car, which for even a modest motor is in the multiple thousands, then just a few extra hundred pounds for a radio, cruise control, and inbuilt massage system, seems like not very much at all.

In this way, contrast serves as a persuasive technique. We’re actually in the territory of what behavioural psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls anchoring. We’re anchored to the higher number and our perspective is skewed. Many of us might believe ourselves to above such kind of chicanery, but Kahneman’s research has said that this stuff can work on pretty much any of us.

And here we see our second reason for contrast: manipulation. You might be tempted to feel a little angry. But is contrast always blinding?

Art/Culture

Contrast is so embedded within the practice of making art that it’s hard to know where to point. From romantic era poet William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, to Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, contrast can become a playground, or a battlefield for artists to explore.

Have you seen the 1983 film ? In it, Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd play characters from the opposite ends of the social spectrum: Aykroyd a wealthy businessman; Murphy a street hustler. The premise of the film begins with a contrast, some bigwigs are trying to settle the nature versus nurture debate, and to resolve the debate they orchestrate the reversal of both Murphy and Aykroyd’s social position – and the film takes off from there.

I won’t spoil the film for you. But we could find more examples of a contrast being used as the premise for a work; Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, even the electro-pop pioneers Kraftwerk and their album The Man Machine, and this article you are reading, all make use of contrasting ideas in order to explore their theme. Admittedly, some of these are much greater than the others but it can be fun to punch above your weight.

Joking aside, I reckon the best art takes a simple technique like a contrast and by exploration finds something complex and meaningful. At least, that’s what many have and will continue to try to do.

So we’ve found another reason. We use contrasts to explore difficult themes or topics, and this helps us to understand and make our way though what is ‘Out There’; they are a valuable tool for the analysis of our most entrenched ideas.

Like the differences between cats and dogs, entrenched ideas and dualities need to be examined, right?

Philosophy

I’ll be the first to admit that I always feel a slight pang of anxiety whenever I attempt to talk about philosophy; I’m just a guy in Manchester writing an article about the difference between cats and dogs, so there’s a feeling of impropriety I go on to speak about a subject ostensibly meant for the greatest minds the planet has ever seen. But here we are.

The philosophers have for centuries been just as fascinated as the artists were by things that appear to contrast. A famous example is Descartes’ Mind – Body Duality: the contrast between the mind and the body appears so self-evident that hundreds if not thousands of thinking years, and reams of papyrus and paper, have been devoted to understanding what it is that distinguishes our razor-sharp consciousness from our clumsy physicality.

Then comes Harvard linguist Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works, who has at this concept; and if I’m right in my understanding of his ideas, which come at the problem from his cognitive psychology perspective, then the dichotomy of body and mind does not really exist at all.

According to Pinker, consciousness is the collective result of all the stuff that goes on in our brain – much like a computer, where the inner parts at first work at a level of simplicity that gets gradually more and more complex until we have a fully functioning machine we can actually interact with.

Whatever the truth is, this example shows how divisions and contrasts, no matter how real they might appear, can actually be a mirage. We need not judge the ideas of the old philosophers too harshly. Mistakes are all a part of the accumulation of knowledge, and it’s from this groundwork that scientists and philosophers such as Daniel Dennett are at work on similar problems today.

Perhaps then, the final reason we use contrast is to make intellectual distinctions to help us understand the world around us, even though sometimes those distinctions are are not really there at all. Are we now ready to answer the original question: is this the case with cats and dogs?

Everything

Contrast is everywhere. I’ve started to notice that in lifts, you can only ever go up or down. Things are on or off. We choose cat or we choose dog. It’s all so banal. It’s also everywhere.

Looking back over the work I did to explore this question, I realise there are probably even more reasons we use contrast than the ones I found. But of those reasons perhaps we can now answer the question – why do we chose between cats and dogs?

All four reasons come into the answer:

Reason One: we find the distinction between cat and dog as words inherently interesting.

Reason Two: we contrast the perceived value of the two animals to persuade our friends of their virtues and perhaps to aid a purchase.

Reason Three: we enjoy exploring the real or perceived differences of cats and dogs for entertainment.

Reason Four: we think that understanding the differences between cats and dogs helps us to understand not only those differences, but ourselves and others (“She’s a cat person”).

Cats and dogs, then, are a sort of super contrast. But the thing is each of the ways we use contrast to define and explore them are more for our own personal gain – be it for fun or for furthering our selves – than for really establishing the true differences and similarities between the animals. In fact, maybe by revealing the motivation behind the use of contrast we can see that certain differences, aside from obvious physical ones, have been artificially created by us.

Well, that’s an idea anyway. Whatever the truth is, I’m confident that what we’ve all now seen is how contrast blows our minds.

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Find out about some ideas which really matter at TEDxSalford 2014 at the Lowry Theatre, Manchester. Ticket sales end Oct 5.  

I’ve been playful in this article with my use of cats and dogs, but there are bigger issues which experts with more weight than I have . The big issues which immediately spring to mind are those of gender, of race, and of social class. Likely there are more.

This article owes a lot to the ideas of real experts. All of the stuff talked about up there and can probably have it’s roots found in these books down here:

How The Mind Works – Steven Pinker

You Talkin’ to Me – Sam Leith

Influence – Robert B Cialdini

Thank You For Arguing – Jay Heinrichs

The Story of Art – E.H Gombrich

Metaphors We Live By – George Lakoff, Mark Johnson

The Tyranny of Words – Stuart Chase

Gender Trouble – Judith Butler