The Costs of Conviction: An interview + book giveaway with Steven Sloman

Issue 177: Steven Sloman's new book on the Costs of Conviction explains how sacred values can lead us astray in decision-making

When you are faced with a decision, do you focus on obtaining the best outcome or on which actions are socially and morally appropriate?

Steven Sloman’s new book, The Cost of Conviction: How our Deepest Values Lead us Astray compares these two primary strategies for making decisions: evaluating outcomes or sacred values. Steven is a professor of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences at Brown University and his research focuses on how people think, reason, make decisions, and form attitudes and beliefs. He has also been Editor-in-Chief of the journal Cognition, and author of Causal Models: How People Think about the World and Its Alternatives.

Drawing on his research, Steven argues that, while both outcomes and beliefs are helpful tools for a good decision maker, people lean on their sacred values more often than they should. In this interview, he explains how shared sacred values are also what lead societies down rabbit holes that can fuel anger and division, and lead to larger-scale catastrophes like war and violence.

Learn more about The Cost of Conviction and order your copy here. Plus, we are giving away 5 free physical copies to The Power of Us subscribers! To enter the giveaway, either…

1. Be a paid subscriber to the newsletter. Paid subscribers are automatically entered into our book giveaways! We have two more book giveaways with different authors coming up this fall. You can subscribe or upgrade your subscription below with a 20% discount until Sept. 12th.

2. If you are not a paid subscriber yet, not to worry. Simply leave a comment below about what topics in The Cost of Conviction interest you the most at the bottom of this post to enter the giveaway.

   Note: Giveaway winners must be a resident of the UK, Mainland Europe, Republic of Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, United States or Canada. (Due to shipping and customs restrictions). [Enter before September 19th, 11:59 pm PST. Five winners will be selected at random and emailed on September 20th!]

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What does your book teach us about social identity or group dynamics?

Our identities are tied to our social groups by shared sacred values. Often, these are absolute values about the appropriateness of actions. We insist that members of our community also share our most fundamental sacred values. For example, would you be proud to have a friend that felt free to jab others with a hot iron or who peppered conversations with outright lies? Shared sacred values are also what lead societies down rabbit holes that can end in catastrophes like war.

When one group decides that tyrannizing or obliterating a different group is a sacred value, that can quickly spiral into violence. But less extreme positions can also lead to serious conflict because violations of our sacred values cause outrage and anger, and an unwillingness to compromise. That’s why conservatives in the United States today are so reactive about challenges to their concept of “family,” and why liberals are so horrified by assaults on democracy and the rule of law.

Reactions to such violations include disgust, willingness to act, and the desire to cleanse oneself. Such reactions become amplified by the us versus them dynamics of a social collective.

What is the most important idea readers will learn from your book?

That many of our important decisions are not made to optimize consequences, and that we would be happier if they were. There is lots of evidence that consequences are less important determinants of choice than we think. We make some decisions to satisfy a sacred value despite the costs (for instance, giving to charity), or to avoid violating a sacred value (not eating meat if we are vegan), or because we have an addiction whose costs are greater than its benefits (many people wish they didn’t gamble or drink to excess).

These forces guide our decision making without regard to consequences. As a result, they sometimes lead to regret. Those who join political movements that reflect their sacred values can regret their choice when the movement moves in an extremist direction. We hitch ourselves to sacred values because they are relatively simple. They give us a way to avoid complicated calculations of consequences through causal reasoning. Reasoning about consequences is not only hard because the world is complex, but it is also prone to error because causal reasoning suffers from biases of its own.

Why did you write this book and how did writing it change you?

I wrote this book to make readers aware of the importance of sacred values in their own decision making and to bring a sacred values perspective into teaching about judgment and decision making (JDM). The book is intended to serve as a primer—not a textbook—on work in JDM. Sacred values have not been ignored by JDM, but they have not had the impact that they deserve.

Writing the book has made me more aware of how muddled our decision making is (including my own). People are constantly confusing sacred values and consequentialist arguments, leading to bewildering discourse and decision making. So one consequence of writing this book is that I am more aware of my sacred values and how they frame my decision making, for good and for ill.

What will readers find provocative or controversial about your book?

Realizing that your own decision making is grounded in sacred values can be disturbing, but also revelatory. Readers may discover that some of their most cherished values, about diversity and inclusion or climate change or about how their company is organized, are not deeply rooted in evidence about how to achieve the best outcomes. Instead, they represent a community’s deep values about the appropriateness of action.

For instance, doing good for the environment sometimes requires building new infrastructure, and doing good for the American economy sometimes involves making use of foreign labor. Seeing costs and benefits clearly can require looking through a frame that is not colored by one’s deepest values. Such a frame requires a clear-eyed examination of the causal forces that lead to outcomes in the real world.

Do you have any practical advice for people who want to apply these ideas (e.g., three tips for the real world)?

1. I can be a little more specific than the ancient Greek proverb, “Know thyself”: Know your own sacred values and be aware when they are influencing you.

2. Know the biases that color your judgments and influence your assessments of the consequences of your decision options.

3. Finally, know when it is appropriate to allow your sacred values to trump those consequentialist assessments. To illustrate, you may decide to abide by the rule of law (a sacred value) even when it means a lousy outcome in a particular case. We’ll all benefit from abiding by such a sacred value in the long run.

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News and Updates

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• Sept 11th: 4:00 EST with Jay

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Catch up on the last one…

Last time, Dom shared some lessons he learned through his experience as a mid-level leader. Check out his list of lessons about leadership, management and collaboration:

Ten things I've learned as a mid-level leader