Transactive Love

Group think, mental delegation, and the art of choosing your brain buddies.

This year, we are learning to love better by exploring the greatest commandment – Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  We’ve searched our hearts and plumbed the depths of our soul for how to love the Lord better, and it is time to investigate our minds.  How do we love God with all our mind?  This week is the last in a ten-part series on learning to love better with our minds… and it is time to recognize that our minds don’t function in a vacuum. 

"Remember, you are loved, so go, love better!"

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Transcript

Daniel Merton Wegner was an American social psychologist.  He studied and researched a variety of psychological phenomenon – my second favorite is called ironic mental processes – namely that the act of trying not to think about something ironically leads to you thinking about it.  If I tell you not to think about a white bear… guess what you are now imagining.    This ironic tendency is exactly why smokers who try not to think about cigarettes find it harder to give up smoking.  It is also a psychological process Jesus already explained when He taught His disciples about the return of the unclean spirit in Matthew 12:

"When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, 'I will return to my house from which I came.' And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So also will it be with this evil generation." (Mat 12:43-45 ESV)

But we aren’t here today to talk about white bears, unclean spirits, or ironic mental theory.  Oh no, today, we are going to talk about Professor Daniel Wegner’s other infamous research – his study of transactive memory, and what happens when your mind is outside your body.

I’m Scott Beyer and this is the Love Better podcast where we explore the truths and lies about love and more importantly how to turn love into a skill – something we can get better at and hone along the way. 

This year, we are learning to love better by exploring the greatest commandment – Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  We’ve searched our hearts and plumbed the depths of our soul for how to love the Lord better, and it is time to investigate our minds.  How do we love God with all our mind?  This week is the last in a ten-part series on learning to love better with our minds… and it is time to recognize that our minds don’t function in a vacuum.  Everyday, you make mental transactions… and if you are married, that is REALLY true.

 Professor Wegner first posited his theory on transactive memory as a way to explain how people think together.  He initially studied couples and families with close relationships.  What he found shouldn’t surprise you if you have been married for any length of time.  People with close relationships often delegate memory.  A husband may remember the calendar and the location of events, while the wife remembers the favorite foods of the guests or the gift to bring to the party.  One spouse might remember the grocery list, while the other remembers when the car needs the oil changed.  One manages tech-savvy troubleshooting issues while the other keeps tabs on the bills and the budget.  In a marriage, couples divide everything from household tasks to important dates and social connections.  In a very real sense, a marriage ends up behaving like one mind in two bodies… exactly by the way what the Bible says about marriage “two shall become one”.

But the memory is transactive.  In my marriage, we know what allergies our friends have but that doesn’t mean I do – those details exist within my wife’s half of the hive mind. Transactive memory means that I don’t need to know about everything because I exist as part of a shared memory system.  But it also means that it is quite possible I will send you into anaphylactic shock if my wife isn’t around.

We use transactive memory in our marriages, our families, our friendships, and even in our work environments.  We figure out who is going to be the specialist in certain areas of knowledge and then we decide it is easier to retrieve that knowledge from them than to retain it ourselves.  In a disturbing modern trend, we are now finding that we have transactive memory with devices, too.  Don’t know the answer? Just ask Siri.  More on internet transactive memory later.

So, what does transactive memory have to do with loving God and your neighbor with all your mind?  A lot.  We don’t use our minds in a vacuum.  Who we think with is just as important as what we think about.

In Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth he famously says, “Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company ruins good morals.’”

The Greek word translated morals is ‘ethos’ which means habit or custom.  It is where we get our English word ‘ethic’ from.  An ethic is a standard or principle of thinking and living.  If you have bad companions, you will find your way of thinking and your habits of living ruined because we don’t think alone, we think together.

Proverbs 13:20 says, “Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.”

Notice the language – companionship doesn’t just impact the behavior, it impacts the mind.  Wise friends, wise thinking.  Foolish friends foolish choices.

Who you marry, who you become close friends with, and even the work environment you choose will impact how you act, but even more so, it will change how you think.

We tend to make our friends experts in our life.  That one friend that loves politics may become your expert for all news and information on current events.  Another friend may become your expert in religious practices.  Friendships can reinforce good thinking or bad thinking.  If your friends make excuses for poor life decisions you can find yourself reinforcing those negative behaviors in your own life. For example, a friend who frequently justifies overspending or skipping work convinces others in the group that these behaviors are fine. Over time, this thinking spreads, leading to financial or professional issues for you, too.

At the beginning of this year, when we talked about the soul, we saw that the most important thing in life is who you are becoming.  Transactive memory teaches us that we are often becoming who we think with.  This is why spouses take on the traits, habits, and mannerisms of their spouse over time.  With a relationship as close as marriage, you learn to finish each others’ sentences.  She starts the sentence, he completes it. Transactive memory.

Our environment plays an immense role in how we think.  So, choose your friends, your media outlets, and your Instagram follows carefully.

Which brings me to a subset of transactive memory – it’s called the Google Effect.  Also known as digital amnesia, it refers to the phenomenon where people are less likely to remember information if they know they can easily look it up online. The term comes from the idea that, because search engines like Google make it effortless to retrieve information, people tend to rely on external sources of memory (like the internet) rather than committing facts to their own memory.

There are some clear upsides to the Google effect.  By allowing us to offload memory to the internet because it is so easily retrievable, some research suggests that we have become more cognitively efficient.  The Google Effect frees up mental resources for problem-solving and creativity because we don’t have to worry about retaining facts.  Similar to how calculators allow us to make more computations now that we don’t need to do all the long division by hand.

However, I imagine you can already guess, digital amnesia has some downsides, too.  Our long-term memory retention has definitely been impacted by the Google Effect.  Your great grandmother remembered everyone of her children, grandchildren, and friends birthdays… you don’t remember any of them because your phone calendar makes it easy to look them up instead.  We become reliant on the internet for things like historical facts, health information, or other general knowledge because we know we can just search online… but I don’t know about you, but I’ve found that not everything I read on the internet is accurate.  What happens when Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo become bad companions, too?

Proverbs 20 tells us that, “The purpose in a man's heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.”

Living with purpose requires deep thinking and if we aren’t careful, the Google effect can leave us meditating in the shallows.  If we allow too much of our memory to be transactive with the internet… at some point we cease to be free thinkers, independently working out our own salvation with fear and trembling.  How can I dwell on what is pure and true and honorable and just and lovely and commendable and excellent and praiseworthy if I just let the hive mind of the interwebs do all my thinking for me?

Transactive memory is a really amazing thing, but we need to have the kind of discernment that protects us from being too reliant on it or letting the wrong types of groups influence our minds.

When your marriage is strong and built upon shared values in Jesus – transactive memory makes the whole stronger than the sum of the parts.  High functioning godly couples can do amazing things… and good companions can have a similar positive impact.  After all, as Proverbs says, “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.”  There is a tremendous value to transactive memory and group dynamics.

This is especially true in a local congregation.  The church is meant to be made out of dynamically different people that all have something to share and offer.  The church of Jesus Christ is compared to a body, as the apostle Paul says, “God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as He chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.”

The vibrance of a congregation is found in its diversity… but a diversity that functions as one and influences each individual part so that optimally each individual, through the collective work of the group, draws nearer to Jesus.

But this can also work the other way.  If you are connected to a religious group that loves each other, but isn’t committed to Scripture, you will find yourself drifting from the Word of God.  How we think about the Bible is very often influenced by who we do that thinking with.  The church you are a part of can mold you for Jesus or away from Him… and you need to do the critical thinking on that subject for yourself.

Which is the principle found in the very first Psalm of the Bible.  Psalm 1 reads:

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.”

Transactive memory is only as effective as the ones you are making the transactions with.  If you build a silo and an echo chamber for your brain, don’t be surprised when you don’t grow closer to God.  And if you surround yourself with fools and sinners, don’t be shocked when you find yourself thinking foolishly and selfishly.

And transactive memory… it doesn’t just happen with humans.  When you are a Christian, it happens with God, too.

In Romans 8, we are told, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”

Sometimes, you don’t know the right thing to pray for or the right words to describe things to God.  The Holy Spirit fills in the vocabulary you don’t have.  There is no better companion than God… especially when your mind is numb and your heart feels full of empty.

But if you want to be wise, then walk in the counsel of the wise.  Choose your friends, your spouse, your internet queries, and most importantly, choose your god wisely because transactive memories are made every day.

Learn to love better.  Learn to keep company carefully.

As always, thank you for listening and hopefully we've done something to help make your life a little bit better.  If you have a chance to rate, review or share the podcast it would be a blessing.  By sharing with others or leaving a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, you help us reach more people. 

Or maybe you have a fun or obscure history account, a feel-good news story, or a riveting scientific fact you think could help us love better.  If so, I’d love to hear it!  Feel free to email me at scott@biblegrad.com 

And if you are ever in the Louisville, KY area, I’d like to invite you to worship with us at the Eastland congregation.  We meet for worship every Sunday and have Bible classes for all ages Wednesday’s, too.  If you want more information about Eastland, visit us at eastlandchristians.org.  Or if you are looking for more tools to enrich your Bible study, visit my personal Bible site, Biblegrad.com, where you can sign up for daily Bible devotionals called Biblebites and receive them in your email each morning, take online Bible classes, or find videos that will help you study through the Bible throughout the year. 

And until next time, “Remember, you are loved, so go… love better.”