“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want,
but I do the very thing I hate.”
(Romans 7:15-20)
“They say the left side of the brain / Dominates the right / And the right side has to labor / Through the long and speechless night”
(Paul Simon)
"Our decisions are shaped by the noise in our minds,
more than by the signal in the information we receive.”
(Daniel Kahneman)
In a recent sermon, I referenced Daniel Kahneman who is considered the “father” of behavioral economics a field which posits that people do not act as rationally in financial decisions as is generally assumed. Specifically, I spoke of Kahneman’s work on loss aversion which says that the emotional pain of losing $100 is twice as strong as the joy of gaining $100. Negative ads are so effective because they tap into our fearful emotional responses. Regrading church dynamics: people don’t fear change; they fear the anticipated loss that change might bring.
Danny Kahneman died March 27th. He was 91 years old. Kahneman was professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University's Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. His book Thinking, Fast and Slow was published in the same year and became a best seller. The Economist listed him as the seventh most influential economist in the world.
I bring Kahneman and his work to your attention because there’s a connection between interim ministry and the cognitive biases Kahneman identified in his book. Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment, e.g. implicit bias is a negative attitude (one we’re not consciously aware of) against a specific social group. (Stay with me.)
Interim ministry training stresses understanding congregations as systems. Congregations are composed of many, different people, yet they often act as one body (cf. Paul’s “body of Christ” analogy). Congregation members are interdependent. When there’s conflict or significant change in the congregation, Interims have been trained to look at the reactions and response of the whole system (church), e.g. When a conflict upsets a church involving the Pastor, it is rarely the case that the Pastor is the only cause or source of conflict. (Still with me?)
Kahneman’s work offers another way to look at congregations and that is through the lens of cognitive biases. Some examples: anchoring (tendency to rely too heavily on one trait or piece of information when making decisions); confirmation bias (tendency to search for, interpret, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions); loss aversion (see above); ingroup bias (tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups).
Perhaps you can see how using Kahneman’s work to understand a congregation’s dynamics could be useful examining the congregation during the transition. Yes, the church is a system but at its core the church is a community of persons who operate on unconscious levels in so many areas.
I’ve been greatly influenced by Daniel Kahneman. His other notable book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment explores how “noise” (unintended variables, e.g. prison sentences are affected by the time of day the judge hands down the sentence) influence decision-making. But that’s for another time.