There Is A God, Cognitive Bias, Our Fossil Record
The Disciple-Leader Newsletter #22 // June 24, 2023.
Discipleship // Leadership // Mental Performance. The best from this week.
DISCIPLESHIP
“For there is a God, and He hath created all things, both the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are.”
2 Nephi 2:14 // The Book of Mormon
This truth might be so basic and fundamental to you that you take it for granted. I certainly do. Yet, there are so many people whose lives would radically change if they could actually say, "For there is a God". They would think differently, act differently, and be motivated by something completely different.
My life has purpose, for there is a God.
I am known and loved, for there is a God.
My circumstances will get better, for there is a God.
My relationships will last forever, for there is a God.
What is currently pressing on you? What gives you anxiety or causes you to lose sleep at night? What do you cherish? What are you questioning? Think about anything of significance to you. Insert, "for there is a God" at the end of your sentence.
There really is a God. He lives. He knows you. He adores you. And whatever is pressing upon you right now, a correct understanding of God will always and only speak hope to you.
LEADERSHIP
“It isn't as bad as you sometimes think it is. It all works out. Don't worry. I say that to myself every morning.”
Gordon B. Hinckley
Psychologists Adam Mastrioni (Columbia) and Dan Gilbert (Harvard) recently published an article in the New York Times titled, “Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything Is Worse”. Here are some bullet point findings from their research:
“235 surveys with over 574,000 responses total and found that, overwhelmingly, people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical and moral today than they were in the past. People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59 and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still happening today. Respondents of all sorts — young and old, liberal and conservative, white and black — consistently agreed: The golden age of human kindness is long gone.”
“We also found strong evidence that people are wrong about this decline. We assembled every survey that asked people about the current state of morality: “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” “Within the past 12 months, have you volunteered your time to a charitable cause?”, “How often do you encounter incivility at work?” Across 140 surveys and nearly 12 million responses, participants’ answers did not change meaningfully over time. When asked to rate the current state of morality in the United States, for example, people gave almost identical answers between 2002 and 2020, but they also reported a decline in morality every year.”
“Other researchers’ data have even shown moral improvement. Social scientists have been measuring cooperation rates between strangers in lab-based economic games for decades, and a recent meta-analysis found — contrary to the authors’ expectations — that cooperation has increased 8 percentage points over the last 61 years. When we asked participants to estimate that change, they mistakenly thought cooperation rates had decreased by 9 percentage points. Others have documented the increasing rarity of the most heinous forms of human immorality, like genocide and child abuse.”
So what does this research mean for us?
"Two well-established psychological phenomena could combine to produce this illusion of moral decline.
First, there’s biased exposure: People predominantly encounter and pay attention to negative information about others — mischief and misdeeds make the news and dominate our conversations.
Second, there’s biased memory: The negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information. Getting dumped, for instance, hurts in the moment, but as you rationalize, reframe and distance yourself from the memory, the sting fades. The memory of meeting your current spouse, on the other hand, probably still makes you smile.
When you put these two cognitive mechanisms together, you can create an illusion of decline. Thanks to biased exposure, things look bad every day. But thanks to biased memory, when you think back to yesterday, you don’t remember things being so bad. When you’re standing in a wasteland but remember a wonderland, the only reasonable conclusion is that things have gotten worse."
How should this research inform our leadership?
The darker people think it is today, the brighter a leader who reflects the light of Jesus Christ shines. All living organisms, whether it's a plant or a human, are drawn toward light.
So in response to how people perceive the world and their individual lives today, follow President Nelson's leadership advice: "True disciples of Jesus Christ are willing to stand out, speak up, and be different from the people of the world. They are undaunted, devoted, and courageous."
MENTAL PERFORMANCE
"Our nervous system leaves no fossil record of our thoughts, feelings or ideas, except those which are transformed into actions."
Andrew Huberman
So how can we train our minds to be biased toward action?
Stanford Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman explained it this way: “The holy grail of neuroscience is, ‘How can I modify my brain?’ Well, you modify it by placing yourself into discomfort and using that as a propeller to move you into action. If you change your behavior, then generally your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions change. Everyone tries to come at it from the other end … I don’t want to relegate feelings. Feelings are extremely important … But when it comes to wanting to shift the way that you function to get better or to perform better or to move away from things like addictive behaviors, it's absolutely foolish for any of us to think that we can do that by changing our thoughts … And yet our programming, our default hardwiring is to, you know, put us in this place where we want to ruminate on all this stuff and wait until we feel like doing something before we do it … (but) its behavior first. Thoughts, feelings, and perceptions follow. Mood follows action.”
The best way to change your thoughts is to change your behavior.
Disciple-Leadership: Jesus-led. Lead like Jesus.