Additive Thinking
Before I start, I should highlight that I am in no way a qualified medical professional or social scientist, and any content therein and thereafter are just purely my personal opinions.
Genesis
I recently attended a week-long conference in Los Angeles and had a lot of time to spare on the 13-hour odd flight to and from LAX. My acoustic brain naturally prevented me from having any sleep, so I daydreamed and tinkered with non-sensical thoughts. One of the many thoughts that arose during the self-induced psychosis is the concept of Reductionist Thinking.
My thoughts are as such:
We know that the human mind has an instinctive and primal need to subset, group, and categorise every living and non-living thing in our environment. This has helped us survive since the dawn of humanity. Bright, colourful plants? Probably poisonous. Long tube thing with insanely quick reflexes? Probably deadly venomous. Big, dark-skinned individual walking around at midnight? Probably a dangerous individual. Uh-oh.
This subconscious mental process protects us from physical harm but may be insufficient for proper cross-culture interactions.
Reductionist thinking - my definition
I derive the concept of reductionist thinking from the engineering industry, namely reductive manufacturing. In reductive manufacturing, we start from a block of refined material (e.g. an aluminium block), and remove volume from said material to achieve a final desired geometry. This is achieved through a variety of manufacturing processes dependent upon the material properties, initial material size, and most importantly the desired final shape.
What I mean to say is that when we meet a stranger from a different culture, we often diminish their positive traits until they align with our expectations of what they should be. This is analogous to the metal shavings generated as a byproduct of reductive manufacturing processes. Except, at a social level, the 'metal shavings' represent lost information about the stranger—information necessary to form a complete picture of them.
Additive thinking
I want to fix this by practicing what I call additive thinking. As you've guessed it, this time we 3D print instead of machining. Instead of stripping away aspects of a stranger’s character, I want to start with a blank template — a base expectation — and, through repeated interactions, gradually add verified positive traits. This way, I can build an accurate and complete picture of their character over time
Note that stereotyping still plays a role here, as it should. One should still take precautions against potentially dangerous individuals; gut instinct can be highly effective even without a priori knowledge of a stranger. Statistics do not lie, and it would be foolish to disregard one's safety by throwing caution to the wind.
However, if we are meeting a colleague for the first time, or taking out a Tinder date for dinner, practicing additive thinking will give us a more complete picture than if we were to practice reductionist thinking. This is because we are not confining an individual's character to our preset expectations but instead constructing it from a neutral starting point. The more interactions we have, the more material we gather, and the more accurately we can build a complete picture of their character.
Final thoughts
This blog post is simply a short documentation of an interesting thought I had while on a long-haul flight, so it may not be worth analyzing too deeply. However, I still believe there is value in practicing additive thinking — starting with a base expectation and building an understanding of others through experience rather than reductionistic assumptions. By approaching people this way, we allow room for complexity and growth, rather than reducing them to preconceptions. This is a mindset I intend to cultivate in my interactions, and I hope it encourages others (especially my close friends who may or may not have read to this line, ping me if you do) to do the same.