\u201cAll you have to be is likable.\u201d This was the advice I received from my senior pastor. He had served at his church for thirty years, and is generally regarded as a legend after decades of successful leadership, and wanted to pass along a tip on how to be successful myself. Yet, I found his perspective to be reductionistic and a bit cynical. That is until I read Daniel Kahneman\u2019s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow<\/i>. I am not sure that my pastor read this book, but he, perhaps intuitively, understood Kahneman\u2019s premise that many people rely on first impressions to make quick decisions about their experiences [1]. What my pastor may not have known is the importance of first impressions to the brain as it begins to formulate a story about the experience. Simply, the brain prefers little effort and relies on past experience and story telling to understand the present and future [2].<\/p>\n
Central to Kahneman\u2019s understanding of the brain is the two-system thinking that consists of fast and slow. System 1 is fast thinking, which is the intuition that quickly assess a situation based on past experience and requires little effort of the brain [3]. System 2, however, is the slow complex portion of thinking that demands concentration as the brain processes according to steps [4]. The brain prefers and relies on System 1 thinking, which leads Kahneman to observe, \u201cLaziness is built deep into our nature\u201d [5] or as my pastor pointed out, just be likable.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n While fast thinking provides a number of advantages for the way we think, it also causes errors that result in real consequence. This can be seen in the biases we form. A pastor\u2019s like-ability is an example of the affect heuristic that describes how people use their likes or dislikes to form conclusions about the world [6]. I witnessed this recently with a new hire at the church I serve. We hired a person for new position that we called operations director. I received numerous questions about the duties of this new position despite explaining it on multiple occasions and having a job description available. I think the questions were more grounded in the comments, \u201che is just not a warm person.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Kahneman\u2019s observations call into question our most basic assumptions about the world, except the intuitive idea that we are a storied formed people. Fast thinking constructs a story that makes sense of the world so that people can have cognitive comfort with the situation they find themselves in, even if the evidence is poor [7]. I am glad I did not know this when my pastor gave his advice. I might have abandoned the effort to invite people to think when they came to church. Why bother arguing with the fast thinkers among us? Perhaps, it is best to use fast thinking to one\u2019s own advantage, just be likable. Given the laziness of our brains, most people will not think too much about it anyway.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n [1] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow<\/i> (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) 21.<\/p>\n [2] Ibid., 86.<\/p>\n [3] Ibid., 21.<\/p>\n [4] Ibid.<\/p>\n [5] Ibid., 35.<\/p>\n [6] Ibid., 103.<\/p>\n [7] Ibid., 209.<\/p>\n \u200c<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cAll you have to be is likable.\u201d This was the advice I received from my senior pastor. He had served at his church for thirty years, and is generally regarded as a legend after decades of successful leadership, and wanted to pass along a tip on how to be successful myself. Yet, I found his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":163,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2347,2166],"class_list":["post-29306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlgp01","tag-kahnman","cohort-dlgp01"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/163"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29306"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29307,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29306\/revisions\/29307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}