If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease | Sent-ts'an, c. 720 c.e.
The binary trap occurs when we tend to think in terms of "either-or" “one-vs-another” instead of thinking probabilistically and considering the full range of possibilities.
Eric Vance who was researching placebos and nocebos asked to be cursed by “proffesionals” in a witch market in Mexico. He was cursed for two weeks eventually got cocky and went even climbing. Two weeks in his wife, who was pragnant, started to feel pain in her belly. By the morning it become pretty bad and they drove to the hospital. “And so we get in the cab and we’re going to the hospital and the only thing that’s going through my head is the curse. And what’s interesting is how quickly your mind goes there – how quickly and it’s a logical fallacy that the Romans called the “propter hoc, ergo hoc,” which is, “if this, then that.”. … I believe in logic but my brain went there so fast when the shit hit the fan. I was suddenly convinced that, “This is going to happen and I would never forgive myself if…” And it would always been in the back of my mind that I had done this. And it turned out, we went to the hospital and there was an excruciating couple minutes where they couldn’t find a heartbeat … and it turned out the baby was fine.
In the field of evolutionary psychology, there is an ongoing debate about the validity of group selection as a mechanism for evolutionary change. Scholars like