THE AUTHENTICITY CODE: Gut Brain / Reasoning Brain

by Casey Erin Clark and Julie Fogh

This is part two of a multi-part series. Read more here.

What is authenticity? 

What does it mean for individuals to have an authentic voice, authentic presence, and authentic power? 

What can organizations do to support every voice in feeling heard and understood??

If you want to examine human behavior and perception, we have to get to know the wizard behind the curtain: our complicated, magical, ridiculous, occasionally mean, sometimes brilliant brain, and its two systems of processing. In his brilliant book Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman calls them “System 1” and “System 2”. For our purposes, we’ll call them the “gut brain” (primal, fast, emotional) and “reasoning brain” (slower, logic-driven).

We're primed for survival.

All of us are primed to do one thing above all else: survive. Our brains are constantly managing energy levels and detecting possible threats. We’ve evolved to make very quick judgements: friend or foe? Safe or dangerous? Normal or abnormal? Those processes run in the background, but they still inform how we encounter every person in our lives.

• Affinity – is this person like me? Do they remind me of myself? 
• Confirmation of our own stories/biases/heuristics – does this person act how I expect someone like them to act? 
• What is my first impression? If it’s positive, every subsequent impression will be added to the positive side of the scale – and vice-versa. This is called the Halo Effect.

We're primed for story.

Our gut brain is always looking for patterns of cause and effect – patterns make sense of the world, which makes our brains feel content. According to Kahneman, infants as young as six months demonstrate an awareness of cause and effect chains, and surprise when those chains are disrupted. It’s hard-wired.  

But not only do we love cause and effect, we love to add intention into the mix. A 1944 experiment used an animated video of different-sized shapes moving around a field that looked like a house with an open door. The participants in the study supplied the narrative—the bully big triangle pursuing the smaller shapes, who then band together to defeat him. We don’t even need human or animal faces to create these narratives! Stories also help us understand the world.

We’re primed to maintain our own comfort.

What’s uncomfortable? Working hard to solve a cognitive problem. Ambiguity. Sensing something new and different. Being incorrect. We will do a lot of mental gymnastics to avoid this kind of discomfort, including using our supposedly wise “reasoning” brain to confirm what our gut brain has already determined to be correct. We’ll also avoid stimulus – including people – whose very presence forces us to reexamine core beliefs and assumptions.

Those feelings of discomfort drain us of energy. Our brains don’t like that at all. 

We know what you might be thinking – “I love new experiences! I love learning! I don’t mind productive discomfort!” And this may be true, but we really do have to CHOOSE that discomfort and see the value in it in order to prevent it from exhausting us, which can make us dumber and meaner. If you feel less intelligent and empathetic when you’re tired, it’s not because you’re a bad person. It’s because you’re a person, and your brain is primed for survival above all else.

We are all biased.

In order to manage the bias that affects how we read and receive other people—to create a culture where authenticity can thrive—we need to learn to interrupt it. We also need to understand that it takes real work and effort. It’s “expensive” to our brains and energy levels. The good news is that this is an area where practice really does make a difference, and practice can make the act of interrupting bias easier and more intuitive.

It’s easy, especially for smart people, to dismiss the gut brain as stupid and emotional and to deny that we use it, but we’re talking about a system that controls NINETY-EIGHT PERCENT of our thinking. And the two percent that’s left really really wants to believe that gut brain, because it’s just plain easier. No matter how smart you are, without practiced self-awareness, your gut brain is running the show.

Recognizing how we make mistakes of perception, snap judgements, and biased decisions is essential to understanding why authenticity is such a challenging concept - both in how we see others and how we see ourselves. 

(Look for part three, "All The World's A Stage", on 8/7/20)