Why do people have such a hard time compartmentalizing?

Overly compartmentalized minds are a bad thing, not a good thing. Deeply committed ideologues tend to have highly compartmentalized minds. Because of this, they are able to simultaneously hold two contradictory views. Even when challenged on the fact that their views are inconsistent, they will fail to see any conflict. They will pull belief A out of compartment A and see if it fits their ideology. If yes, they put it away and pull out belief B for the same test. So long as both pass that test, they are held even if one flies directly against the other.

You seem to be thinking of a different sort of compartmentalization. Could you explain a but further what you mean. An example of it might help me understand the question.

Because life is not compartmentalized. What you do and say in one environment impacts the others.

If you can put your opinions away and work in a competing arena, good for you. But not everyone is like that. Many people have to live their beliefs.

@ETpro I don’t really understand the difference between being able to compartmentalize things and being overly compartmentalized. Seems to me like saying the door isn’t open because the edge of the door is only 5 inches from the frame instead of against the wall. Anyway, more details follow.

Religion and science: “because I believe in the bible I therefore cannot believe in anything else, like my biology text book or the stuff I see with my own eyes.”

Work and personal life: someone says something bad about your work and you take it to mean that they think you are the screw up, not your work.

Opinions and facts: using words that should be clear indicators of opinion such as “should be clear” are treated as though they were meant to be factual and thus the reader/listener treats it as such.

@tigress3681 – A light example – overcompartmentalized individuals will harshly critique a persons work without considering their feelings because they feel as if the person shouldn’t take it personally in any case.

When you overcompartmentalize, there’s a tendency to hold other people responsible for their reactions to you, rather than realizing that you contribute to the reaction, and it could be easy to avoid.

So, overcompartmentalized person would say, “man, that presentation you just did really sucked, you slurred and your color choices were impossible to look at” versus a healthily compartmentalized person who might say, “man that presentation you just did really sucked, pronounce your words more clearly and use colors that are easier to look at”?

Overcompartmentalized people make other people no longer responsible for their own actions?

@tigress3681 – They’re not dicks by necessity – but the overcompartmentalization could lead to them being dicks in particular ways.

And you’re reversing the cause-effect issue here. Neither of those examples appear to be examples of good critique of bad performance. But the fact that the person performed badly might very well be their fault – future problems because the person feels like you were insulting them because your phrasing was extreme or brash, and future reactions they might have due to an increased sensitivity from this feeling, was partially due to how you chose to address the employee (you in the general sense, of course).

Thanks iamthemob, interesting perspectives.

@tigress3681 You got some great answers from @iamthemob. I will just add that all human behavior falls somewhere on a bell curve. We need some level of compartmentalization to be able to focus on won thing out of the remendous chatter and clutter of day-to-day living. Compartmentalization only becomes a problem to clear, rational thinking when taken to extremes.