Daniel Gardner's "The Science of Fear" - how Feeling always trumps Reason, and how YOU can use it in your work!

Boo!

Did I scare you?

Maybe I'm losing my touch. Or maybe you haven't been watching any scary movies recently.

Fear is on my mind, because I just read Daniel Gardner's The Science of Fear. It's largely about how we're Stone Age creatures relying on prehistoric brains to make decisions. The book describes the dozens of ways we make decisions, thinking they make sense, when they're really “gut” reactions. For example, The "Example Rule," which Gardner tells us is the easier it is to recall examples of something, the more common that something must be. So if we just watched a movie full of murder and mayhem, it's no wonder we tiptoe through our dark bedroom, groping for the light switch. Our Stone Age minds think we're really in danger––because we just saw a lot of people in danger! Never mind that it was fiction. Who hasn't felt that way, scared by something we know, reasonably, couldn't possibly be true?

Gardner explains this, and other “rules,” by discussing one of the concepts I mentioned recently when I was writing about Paul Slovic's work, and in fact he cites Slovic repeatedly. He says the human brain has two systems of thought. Let's call them Feeling and Reason.

“System Two is Reason. It works slowly. It examines evidence. It calculates and considers. When Reason makes a decision, it's easy to put into words and explain.

System One––Feeling––is entirely different. Unlike Reason, it works without our conscious awareness and is as fast as lightning. Feeling is the source of the snap judgments that we experience as a hunch of an intuition or as emotions like unease, worry, or fear.”

For example, after September 11th, thousands of people briefly shifted from traveling on planes to traveling in cars. Who wasn't scared to fly after 9/11? I sure as heck was. But due to the far greater risk of traveling in cars, psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer discovered that 1,595 Americans were killed in car crashes as a direct result of the switch from planes to cars. By September 2002, travel patterns had returned to normal. While taking pains to recognize the suffering that 9/11 caused for so many people, the book points out repeatedly how tiny the risk of terrorism to any one of us. But terrorism is terrifying! The Example Rule tells us that because we recall something as horrifying as 9/11 so vividly, it must be common! And so we put ourselves at much greater risk by following Feeling rather than Reason, by traveling by car rather than by plane.

The book is filled with example after example of how we follow Feeling over Reason, and how often we're powerless not to. So this is not a post about fear, really. It's about the power of Feeling. Storytelling is inherently built on Feeling. Gardner says:

“Shakespeare may have as much to tell us about psychology as psychologists do, which is why we respond to his plays as we do. When Iago whispers in the ear of Othello and Othello's love for Desdemona turns to hate, and hate to murder, we sense that yes, this could happen. This is what jealousy and distrust can do. This is true.”

Othello's reaction is completely human, though more extreme (I hope) than many of us would have. Which is what makes the story so compelling: we recognize his behavior in our own, and in fact, we recognize Iago's! (See Tom Hiddleston's video for further discussion.)

The fact is, any artist has enormous power to wield this same power, the power of Feeling. By appealing to Feeling, an artist has an opportunity to cause enrollment, which I described when talking about Rosamund and Benjamin Zander's work; it's also a key concept from Landmark Education. As the Zanders said,

"Enrollment is the art and practice of generating a spark of possibility for others to share.... we have at our fingertips an infinite capacity to light a spark of possibility. Passion, rather than fear, is the igniting force. Abundance, rather than scarcity, is the context."

Julie & Julia came out last week as well, it was number two at the box office; it's a crowd-pleasing, entertaining film anchored by a spectacular performance by Meryl Streep. Meryl, Amy Adams, and the writer/director Nora Ephron (not to mention Authentic client Chris Messina) enroll an audience, and sweep us away in a wave of possibility. The story itself is compelling; a forty-something Julia Child takes on French cooking and changes the way the world sees food. A young woman turns her life around by simply being open to the possibility Julia created decades earlier. Simple enough: a story about two women in different times, each taking on a challenge in her life and transforming through the process of facing that challenge. The film succeeds because of its compassion, because it creates real, human portraits that lead us to Feel. Feeling always trumps Reason; if I told you the story of Julie & Julia in a sentence or two, you'd come away feeling uninspired. But watching the film, it's hard not to be moved.

Consider that Feeling works best when it feels authentic. We're all experts at seeing through inauthenticity, even if we don't know we are. This is where Reason sometimes fails but Feeling's signal can always be heard loud and clear. When a performance rings false, it's ability to elicit Feeling is diminished.

Perhaps it's a matter of respect, and feeling respected. Psychologist Piero Ferrucci talks about the mythical image of Procrustes' bed in The Power of Kindness:

"This terrible man would make people lie on his bed. If they fit exactly, they were lucky. If they were too long, he would cut off their feet, and if they were too short, he would stretch them till they were the right size.... at some time or another, we are all tempted to shape others the way we want them to be."

Watching a human being on screen or on stage who we recognize as a real person ideally makes us feel respected, because they share recognizable and understandable traits with us. They're not making us wrong in their performance, even if they're unlike us on the surface. They're causing us to feel compassion by their work, which must, in turn, be compassionate.

But many of us look at our work like Procrustes. We take on a story, or a character, thinking of the way it should look, based on our preconceived notions. But as I discussed recently, what we think it should be, even when we're really, really sure, ain't necessarily so.

So for an artist to elicit Feeling, this incredibly powerful force that can bring possibility to life, that can scare us, and excite us, we have to star with the real thing. Compassion.

Boo! *

Daniel Gardner's "The Science of Fear" - how Feeling always trumps Reason, and how YOU can use it in your work!

“It Ain't Necessarily So” - a letter from Lake Champlain

Hiya! Sorry for the long delay in posting anything. I'm on vacation with my family in Vermont, and every morning so far, I've been determined to write something. Alas, it hasn't happened until now. I acknowledge that I've been out of integrity; even though I never explicitly promised to write more than once every two weeks, I know that I should be writing more often than I have been. I could blame it on the poor internet connection here, etc. but it's really just my doing. So I apologize, and I'm committed to sharing my thoughts with you at least once a week, if not more.


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Besides all the swimming, eating, Monopoly playing, horsey riding, and wine drinking, I've been doing a lot of reading on this trip. Anyone who's been in my office knows I always have a pile of books on my desk that I'm getting to, and I've had a great opportunity while here to catch up.

When the book The Three Laws of Performance by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan came out earlier this year, I read it immediately. As many of you know, I'm a big fan of Landmark Education, and since Steve is one of the head guys there, I knew the book would be full of great insights. So I took the book with me on this trip to reread. I knew there'd be new insights for me personally, but I was also hoping to find a thing or two for the blog.

And lo and behold! Steve and Dave's book is primarily a business book, and the Three Laws are mainly described as they relate to business situations. But one of the foundations of the book is the concept of how things occur to us.

“Consider that when we do something, it always makes complete sense to us. On the other hand, when others do something, we often question, 'Why are they doing that? It doesn't make any sense!' But if we got into the world of that person, and looked at how the situation occurred to him, we would experience that the same actions that we were questioning were completely and absolutely the perfect and correct thing for him to do, given how the situation is occurring to the person. Each person assumes that the way things occur or him or her is how they are occurring for another. But situations occur differently for each person. Not realizing this can make another's actions seem out of place.... Given the different positions that well-informed, intelligent people often take on a situation, there is a significant difference between the objective facts of the matter and the way those facts occur to each of us... we are not saying that there isn't a 'real world.' We are merely pointing out that our actions relate to how the world occurs to us, not to the way it actually is.”

Steve and Dave go on to say that we relate to each other as if “each is dealing with the same set of facts” when in fact we're really dealing with how the facts occur to us.

I recently took a Landmark course on communication, and the course leader led us through exercises to deeply and directly understand this concept. She reminded us that when we believe something to be a fact, it ain't necessarily so.

This way of understanding human behavior isn't new; it's surely at the heart of Landmark's work, and it's a common theme in Buddhist teachings. And this is the heart of compassion; suffering with, deeply understanding another's point-of-view. Psychologist Piero Ferrucci says in his book The Power of Kindness:

“...empathy––which is at first only a simple instinctual capacity to resonate––develops and becomes the capacity to understand other people's feelings and points of view, to identify with them.” [emphasis added]

“However varied and vast our inner world may be, it is still a closed system, ultimately narrow and oppressive. Our thoughts, worries, desires: Is that all there is? Sometimes it seems so. But to step out of this world and enter other ones––the passions, fears, hopes, and suffering of other human beings––is akin to an interplanetary voyage. Yet it is a feat far simpler to accomplish. Closing ourselves to other people makes us imbalanced, whereas participating in their lives makes us healthier and happier. Self-attention of self-focus is correlated with greater depression and anxiety. We know this much for sure: People who are most concerned with themselves and less with others are more likely to feel fearful or unhappy.”

This might seem like a matter of personal choice: Who are you, Jon, to tell me to be compassionate, to cultivate empathy? Who are you to tell me that the world isn't necessarily how it occurs to me? If my facts are right, at worst it seems you might be more anxious, and less happy. That's surely not mine to dictate. But the stakes are higher than you might imagine. Ferrucci continues:

“Training in empathy is perhaps one of the most urgent needs in our educational programs at all levels. Yehudi Menuhin, the great violinist, once made an extraordinary statement in an interview: If German youth had been brought up not only to appreciate the music of Beethoven, but to sing and dance traditional Jewish music, the Holocaust would not have happened.”

And so here's where the arts come in. You, as an artist, or as someone who contributes to the arts, has an opportunity to cultivate empathy with your work. Is it likely that doing so could prevent another Holocaust? Hard to imagine. But we can imagine the effect cultivating compassion can have on an audience and extrapolate.

In a world where there is so much suffering, then, your contribution to the arts suddenly gains urgency. Think for a moment, about where there is suffering in the world, and how the arts––specifically, your work in the arts can contribute, and make a difference.

Signing off for now from beautiful Vermont... stay tuned for an amazing video from Fuse Entertainment manager Richard Demato, speaking on what's possible when an artist comes from a place of true inspiration, having courage in the face of fear. *

“It Ain't Necessarily So” - a letter from Lake Champlain