Thinking Into Acting vs. Acting Into Thinking

Mike’s entry on thinking into acting vs. acting into thinking reminded me of this fascinating account in Blink, this Malcolm Gladwell book I just read and highly recommend. He talks about these researchers who studied and cataloged facial expressions. Part of their research required duplicating those expressions to each other. Strangely, one of them found that on days they had to mimic expressions of anger and distress, he felt markedly worse emotionally. To his surprise, his colleague reported feeling the same thing. So they started to track things as they continued. What they found was that just making certain facial expressions was enough to invoke a physiological response in their autonomic nervous system. For example, when they duplicated particular facial expressions of anger, their heartbeats and temperature went up. They could not disconnect their facial expression from the system.

They did other experiments where they asked one group to relive a stressful experience, and showed another how to create on their faces expressions that correspond to stressful emotions. When they measured the physiological responses of the two groups, they were the same. In another experiment, they showed the same cartoon to two groups. One was forced to hold a pen between their lips, which prevented them from smiling. The second was forced to hold it between their teeth, which forced them to smile. The second group found the cartoons much funnier.

Here’s what Gladwell has to say about it:

We think of the face as the residue of emotion. What this research showed, though, is that the process works in the opposite direction as well. Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.

Perhaps faith (or thought in general) and action are the same way, more equal partners in the process than we commonly think. And I’m with Mike in doing more to change thinking.

As far as Hirsch saying acting our way into new thinking is more in line with Jesus, I have to think about that. What throws me is, I was always taught that St Paul structures his letters in a certain way, starting by explaining our status before God, before getting into the nitty-gritty of what we should be doing differently. And I was told that this was intentional, because we need to know who we are before we can change what we do. It’s not quite that simple, but that’s the gist. So I’m undecided.

I think I’m more inclined to say of thought and action kind of what Gladwell says, not that one does or should definitively drive the other, but that they’re more equal partners than we usually believe. And I’ve been trying to be more action-driven rather than thought-driven, especially in regards to the spiritual disciplines, which has worked out reasonably well. But I’m still stumped how that works out with certain sins. Is overcoming temptation thought-driven or action-driven? In the end it’s grace-driven, but what that looks like and how that works out I’m still figuring out.