Where we keep decisions
Our brains store decisions, like ingredients in a cupboard. We keep these decisions around to inform further decisions. We decide what we want for lunch, who we’ll go out with, or whether the roof needs fixing. Once we decide what we want for lunch, we then decide how to go about getting it. Pizza for lunch? The next decision might well be choosing toppings, or choosing between delivery or pick up.
Getting more brains
The decisions you keep are not always the decisions you make by yourself. A friend tells you about a great new pizza place, so you decide to try it. That’s how we use the brains of others — we rely on them to give us decisions that we can keep and use later.
Trusted sources are friends who share their brainwork with us. We adopt their decisions, often without deep examination, adding them to our own.
Trust is the decision you keep
When you keep a decision around, you trust it. You tell yourself, “I’ve made this decision, it can be used now.” It’s more comfortable to keep the decisions you’ve already made than to discard them.
Of course you can go back and look at one again, maybe even reverse it. It means you don’t trust it any more.
But it’s expensive to go back and check a decision. It takes time and effort. While you’re doing all that checking, you can’t move forward. You might waste your time, and miss out on something.
Trust is the great time-saver for brains. It’s a shortcut. It means you can just use a ready-made decision you made earlier. You don’t need to go back and revisit it.
The trust recognizer
How do we choose what to believe in? We have a gatekeeper which decides what’s trustworthy and what isn’t. This is our trust recognizer. It sets the bar for the decisions we abide by, decisions we disavow, and decisions we need to re-examine. It is the arbiter of what “feels right.”
When we choose what to have for lunch, we’re influenced by a wide range of inputs: hunches, appetites, experience, reason, evidence, and the suggestions of complete strangers. Our trust recognizer is no different. It employs the very same mechanisms and influences as our other decisions. How rigorously we decide what to believe in is no more or less disciplined than how we decide what to eat for lunch, and just as susceptible to manipulation and mistakes.
The trust recognizer is special in just one way: it makes decisions about our decisions. “Trusted” means we keep a decision in the cupboard, and proceed to rely on it. “Not trusted” means we don’t believe; we set those decisions aside.
Can’t trust this anymore
There are older decisions we no longer believe in. Those are kept somewhere else, or perhaps discarded. Our memories of decisions past are an important part of experience. Our past decisions have something to teach us about the decisions we make today.
We used to order extra cheese and hot peppers on every pizza. One day, we made a new decision to stop doing that. Perhaps we even had a good reason.
The old decisions are retired and serve as a lesson to us. The new decisions which replace them are very much kept in the active cupboard, to be called upon the next time we’re ordering lunch.
So what
The most important decision you can make is to decide which decisions you keep. Trust is what separates them. The decisions you keep are trusted, those you abandon are untrusted.
The trust recognizer makes the call. It uses hunches, appetites, experience, reason, evidence, and the suggestions of complete strangers to make that call. It’s fallible and can be manipulated. But it’s in charge of what you believe in.