Transcript

You’re Not As Rational As You THINK | Steven Sloman

From John R. Miles · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 45 min · 6,158 words · 62 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "You’re Not As Rational As You THINK | Steven Sloman", an episode of John R. Miles published January 13, 2026 (45 min, about 6,158 words). It mentions 15 people, works and ideas, including The Cost of Conviction, The Knowledge Illusion, DEI initiatives, Paul Jennings Hill, Danny Kahneman.

What this episode is about

The discussion centers on the importance of engaging with contrasting viewpoints to enhance decision-making and critical thinking. Dr. Steven Sloman highlights that while strong convictions guide our values, they can also lead to biased thinking, emphasizing that robust arguments are forged through dialogue with those who challenge our perspectives.

Key takeaways

  • Conviction can be a double-edged sword; it shapes us, but can also shackle us to harmful beliefs.
  • Our understanding of complex issues often exists in slogans, exposing the 'knowledge illusion' in public discourse.
  • Disagreement hones our arguments; your fiercest critics might reveal the flaws in your most cherished beliefs.
  • Values guide us, but ignoring their real-world implications can lead to blind zealotry and unintentional consequences.
  • Navigating conviction means balancing passion with scrutiny—too much of either can steer us off course.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: The Cost of Conviction, The Knowledge Illusion
  2. – 10:00: The Cost of Conviction
  3. – 15:00: Movember, Scott Galloway
  4. – 20:00: DEI initiatives
  5. – 25:00: Paul Jennings Hill, William Jennings Bryan, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill
  6. – 30:00: Amos Tversky, Emil Bernau, Kurt Gray, Don Moore
  7. – 40:00: The Knowledge Illusion
  8. – 45:00: The Cost of Conviction, The Knowledge Illusion, Danny Kahneman, Amos Tversky

Notable quotes from "You’re Not As Rational As You THINK | Steven Sloman"

  • Well, I'm absolutely thrilled to have you. And I wanted to have this discussion because your brand new book, The Cost of Conviction, really does something that's…
    about The Cost of Conviction · at
  • Was just trying to describe in the sense that I do believe what's happening with young men is in part a response to DEI initiatives.
    about DEI initiatives · at
  • Follow-up question on this. One of the people you highlight in the book was Paul Jennings Hill, who was an American minister, religious extremist, and anti-abortion terrorist.…
    about Paul Jennings Hill · at
  • The reason that I discussed William Jennings Brian is because it was an opportunity to discuss this sort of paragon example of how what sacred values, how they inhibit discussion, but.
    about William Jennings Bryan · at
  • On both sides and the way that Hitler used sacred values to unite the Germans and then you also saw Winston Churchill do it as a way to ignite the English through the…
    about Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill · at
  • Now explaining what those are. A lot of the critical work was done in the 70s and 80s and 90s by Danny Conman and Amos Tverki pointing out the heruristics that we use in order…
    about Amos Tversky · at
  • To go back to the old seinal work of Conor and Tverki. And I think reading it firsthand is incredibly enlightening because they wrote as if they were writing the Bible in the sense that every sentence had value and every.
    about Danny Kahneman · at
  • Well, so as you very nicely pointed out, I do have these two books that I hope people pay attention to. The first was the knowledge illusion published in 2017 and the latest is…
    about The Knowledge Illusion · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Paul Jennings Hill — Person · Case study / illustrative example · 1 mention · first at
    Used as a chilling example of sacred values (anti-abortion conviction) motivating extreme action and taboo/tragic tradeoffs.
  • Danny Kahneman — Person · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at
    Cited (with Tversky) as foundational decision-science researcher on heuristics; his later popular book is mentioned as an intro.
  • Amos Tversky — Person · Referenced expert · 2 mentions · first at
    Cited alongside Kahneman for seminal work on heuristics used to simplify decisions.
  • William Jennings Bryan — Person · Historical example · 1 mention · first at
    Referenced as an example of how sacred values can inhibit discussion yet compel political action and mobilization.
  • Scott Galloway — Person · Referenced author/commentator · 1 mention · first at
    Referenced regarding a book (A Drift) used to support claims about changing values and outcomes for young men.
    Especially in the United States, are changing so rapidly. I think this has been shown in the book a drift that Scott Galloway put out a couple years ago, but it's really in the…
  • Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill — Person · Historical example · 1 mention · first at
    Cited as an example of using sacred values to mobilize a nation during WWII toward sacrifice and resistance.
  • Emil Bernau — Person · Referenced scholar · 1 mention · first at
    Referenced for work on dehumanization as an extreme outcome of enforcing sacred values and group conflict.
    Yeah. When I think about what we're talking about, it always reminds me of the late Emil Bernau and his work on dehumanization because that to me is like the extreme of what…
  • Kurt Gray — Person · Referenced scholar · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as also discussing dehumanization, reinforcing the episode’s theme of moral conflict and group dynamics.
    Dehumanization because that to me is like the extreme of what this can bring. I think Kurt Gray has Kurt Gray has discussed this as well in his work.
  • Don Moore — Person · Referenced scholar · 1 mention · first at
    Cited as an influence on the host’s thinking about ethics and decision-making in business contexts.
    But I want to talk about a couple other people's work. I've been a big fan of Don Moore and Max Aerman, for decades now, and their work on ethics and decision making is something that I really tried to use during my own career when I was a.
  • Max Aerman — Person · Referenced scholar · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned alongside Don Moore as influential on ethics and decision-making; used to frame Sloman’s point about simplification.
    But I want to talk about a couple other people's work. I've been a big fan of Don Moore and Max Aerman, for decades now, and their work on ethics and decision making is something that I really tried to use during my own career when I was a.

Books & papers

  • The Cost of Conviction — Book · Core artifact/topic · 3 mentions · first at
    Central book discussed; frames the episode around how sacred values and conviction can distort reasoning and polarize groups.
  • The Knowledge Illusion — Book · Referenced prior work · 3 mentions · first at
    Sloman’s earlier book provides the foundation for the episode’s discussion of the illusion of explanatory depth and social dependence in thinking.

Companies & orgs

  • Movember — Company · Referenced organization · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as a movement highlighting changes in men’s values and challenges facing young men.
    Been shown in the book a drift that Scott Galloway put out a couple years ago, but it's really in the whole movement that Movember has been doing to try to show how different men's values are changing. What do you think about that?

Concepts & topics

  • DEI initiatives — Concept · Referenced concept · 1 mention · first at
    Discussed as a perceived driver of backlash among young men, contributing to identity-based sacred values and polarization.

Places & events

  • Rosetto, Pennsylvania — Place · Illustrative example location · 1 mention
    Cited as a community case study where shared values once unified the town and later shifted, contributing to unraveling.
    Rosettto, Pennsylvania... shared values that united the whole town.

Full transcript with timestamps

If you really want to make good decisions, you need people with contrasting views to yours, right? You don't necessarily need them to generate ideas, to generate hypotheses, but you need them to test those ideas, right? Like the best way to perfect your own thinking is to describe it to someone who disagrees with you vehemently. And that way you'll construct really good arguments.

Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host John R. Miles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long- form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators scientists military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become Passion Struck.

I am so excited today to welcome Dr. Steven Slman. Welcome, Steve, to Passion Struck. How are you today?

I'm great. Thanks so much for having me, John. Well, I'm absolutely thrilled to have you. And I wanted to have this discussion because your brand new book, The Cost of Conviction, really does something that's counterintuitive to many of the discussions I have. So many of the conversations talk about how your values guide you to the right place. This kind of gives another lens of those sacred values and how they might take you to a different destination. So, I'm going to start out with this. You've spent decades studying how people think individually and collectively.

What drew you to write a book about conviction and the cost of our deepest values?

Well, it was a couple of things. On one hand, it's hard to live in America right now without thinking about conviction and what its determinants are and what problems it leads to. But more specifically, I had been doing a bunch of research on how individuals think and how we depend on the people around us for thought. And it became clear that we have two very different ways of thinking and making decisions. And one of them is the kind of thinking that we actually tend to think we're engaged in all the time. Namely, thinking about how our actions will lead to consequences.

But the other is a kind of thinking that really comes to the four when we're thinking about important social and moral issues, namely whether the actions were taking we consider to be right or wrong. And this distinction became really important when I was studying something called the knowledge illusion or in psychological circles it's referred to as the illusion of explanatory depth. But the idea is that people don't understand things as well as they do, as well as they think they do. And you show this simply by asking people how well they understand a common object, say like a toaster or a zipper or a toilet. And then ask them and people tend to think they understand it pretty well, but then when you ask them to explain it, it turns out they can't explain how it works at all. So people lower their own sense of their understanding and we have found that this is true even with regard to political policies. So if

you ask people how well they understand a political policy Obamacare say they'll think they have decent understanding. When you ask them to explain it they stumble over their words discover they can't and lower their sense of understanding. And this suggested to me that what's really going on in these situations is that people are actually coming to the policy not with a deep understanding of what the consequences of the policy are but with a few slogans that they get from their communities about why the commu the policy is consistent with their values or inconsistent with their values and why it outrages them.

So this is really what led me directly to this distinction between thinking about the appropriateness of the actions that we take like supporting a particular policy as opposed to thinking making that sort of difficult step of thinking hard about what the actual implications of the policy will be. So, sorry that was a long answer to a short question.

Yeah, I I just turned in my manuscript earlier this week for my tw 12th book that I've written. And I always think every time I write a book, it makes me more aware of my own values and my own thought processes. I'm sure for you as you were writing this, it pro probably made you aware of your own sacred values and how they shape your own decisions for good or bad. Could you possibly share an example that may be changed?

Sure. So, the brunt of the book is to argue that we depend more on our sacred values than we should. And so, really what I spent my time thinking about while writing the book was how I should avoid my sacred values and actually make the difficult step of thinking hard about the consequences of things. But you're right. As you think about any issue, you become clearer and clearer about what your sacred values are or aren't. And you could take any policy that we're now at war about in this country and by virtue of thinking about it, you become clearer and clearer about your sacred values. So, you know, immigration, I had to come to terms through writing the book with the fact that despite being a good liberal, I do think that there are limits on the rights people should have to come to enter this country. I think perhaps the one and only issue in which I agree with the current federal administration is

birthright citizenship. Right? It's not obvious to me that simply being born in this country should afford you citizenship. Certain things were clarified for me in the process. And by the way, congratulations on your new book.

Oh, well, thank you. It as you turn in the manuscript and then it takes 12 months to 18 months for them to get it to print. So, it's going to be a while, but I appreciate it. I always like how books open up and you open up with the concept of zealotry like you go from ancient Judea to Jon of Arc. Why do you think stories of extreme conviction like those still resonate so powerful today?

I think that our sacred values are what tie our communities together. So if you ask what represents a political party as opposed to a different political party or what's special about a particular country, why do people like going to Paris so much? And I think the answer is often in the form of sacred values. So what people like more than anything is to observe other people. That's turn on the TV, unless you're watching a nature show, you're watching other people do something. And so there's something about sacred value which is really at the heart at the center of the thing that interests us the most, namely other people's goals and ambitions and how they pursue them. The stories we tell are about other people and their motivations and people's primary motivations for the larger acts that they do are their sacred values.

So I think that's what drives history to a large degree. Yeah. So, a a friend of mine you may know is Jud Brewer, who also teaches at Brown, and Jud is known a lot for his work on habits. You distinguish sacred values from habits or conventions. H how do we know when we've crossed into being sacred from a habit that we might be performing?

Interesting. Finally, John, I think about it in the other direction. So, I think of habits as behaviors that we perform in a a regular way based on associations to the environment around us. I actually think sacred values are like habits. They become like habits over time because they're also ingrained in us through this process of reinforcement learning that starts when we're very young, right? We get our first sacred values from our parents and from our families and our cultures reinforce all kinds of beliefs about which actions are right and which are wrong. I actually think sacred values are an example of a habit. They just are a habit that have a lot of symbolic content. They're habits that we think about. They're habits that govern the way we frame our understanding of other people's behavior. So, they're cognitive habits in that sense.

Thank you for that distinction. One of the things, Steve, that I've really spent a lot of my time doing is studying the science of belonging, kind of Jeff Cohen's work, Gregory Walton's, and the science of mattering, Gordon Flet's work, as well as some of the work that Lorie Santos and others have done. And you've written that our identities are tied to our social groups through shared sacred values. And when I think of those social groups, a lot of it has to do with that sense of belonging that we have. How do these sacred values both unite us but also times drive us into conflict in these social groups?

Yeah. Well, that's a really great and important question and it's nice to think about the issue in terms of belonging because I think you really captured the essence of what motivates us to see the world through our sacred values. Look, I guess I have a fairly simple view of this, which is that we're we align ourselves with some community and those communities inevitably have some sacred values, right? So, if you think about the community of Americans, then once upon a time, democracy was a sacred value and free speech was a sacred value. And if you're a Republican, then family values are a sacred value. And if you're a Democrat, then there other things. Doing little harm is a sacred value. Every group, even hockey teams have sacred values in a way, right? Win the game. So whichever community you're a part of, if you don't accept the fundamental sacred values of that community, you're not going to have

a sense of belonging within that community. So sacred values are tightly tied to our sense of belonging in that sense. But there's this unfortunate dynamic which occurs which is that we tend to distinguish ourselves from other nearby communities through our sacred values. If we're on one hockey team, then we distinguish ourselves from the other hockey teams that we play in that we want to beat them and they want to beat us, right? There's a clear distinction there. But you can see this in all kinds of communities.

The obvious way example these days is to think about how Republicans and Democrats define themselves. And what happens is our sacred values become more and more polarized because they're used to represent our community. So if they're going to represent our community, then they can't represent the other guy's community. So we choose values which maximally distinguish us and we start focusing on those values which maximally distinguish us so that our self-defin becomes a sort of anti-definition of the other side.

Yeah. As I was thinking through this myself, I kept going back to some of the work of Malcolm Gladwell, especially his work around Rosettto, Pennsylvania, that town that for so many years had shared values that united the whole town for decades and decades. And then those shared values started to shift and the town began to unravel. And I think if you look at that and a town's only a couple thousand people, but you can look at that as an example of what happens to us across society. And one of the areas that I think this is happening is in the way that the values in young men, especially in the United States, are changing so rapidly. I I think this has been shown in in the book a drift that Scott Galloway put out a couple years ago, but it's really in the whole movement that Movember has been doing to try to show how different men's values are changing. What do you think about that?

Well, I think it's sad and I think that there's a huge social cost to what you're pointing out, but I also think it exemplifies exactly the dynamic that I was just trying to describe in the sense that I do believe what's happening with young men is in part a response to DEI initiatives. So they see themselves as being downtrodden and disrespected and not having opportunity. Sometimes it goes overboard clearly when they feel that their opportunities they should have is to have sex with anybody they want. Then I I think that's crazy.

But um if they see their the opportunities they're losing to be not being able to get a job because they're male or being told that the life they lead is toxic by virtue of their gender, then you can see why they would want to distinguish themselves from those who are promulgating those values that are so offensive to them. So as a result, they develop a community that just completely turns off everybody else and start developing sacred values that distinguish them and allow them to cheer for themselves in a way that cuts off others and in the end creates a lot of hostility and unfortunately a lot of violence too.

It is a really sad state of affair. I was looking at some of the most recent statistics and across the world there are 132 million young men who've even dropped out of high school and these trends are just continuing and continuing. Well, and anyway, you talk about tradeoffs in the book and you discuss taboo tradeoffs and tragic tradeoffs. What are the differences? Can I just make one quick comment about young men before we before I try to

Absolutely. I just I do want to say that I don't think sacred values are the whole story there, right? There's a lot going on in society. The not just social media, but the presence of AI and internet porn and all sorts of pressures are going on at the same time. and the sacred values that people hold are just part of the mix that are used to justify feelings that may be arising for other reasons. I do think it's important to maintain some perspective on the complexity of the situation and I think it's particularly important in this conversation because the appeal to sacred values is essentially an attempt to simplify a complicated world. And so this process of simplification is actually what's leading to a lot of the problems that we're facing. people are just not willing to face the complexity of life.

So back to your question, tragic versus taboo tradeoffs. So the thing about sacred values is that people tend to hold them absolutely right. They differ from consequentialist values in that consequential consequentialist values have to be traded off, right? So you want to get something that's as cheap as possible, but you also want to get something that has the best quality. And so there's a tradeoff between price and quality. And when you're thinking in consequentialist terms, you always have to make these kinds of tradeoffs. That's actually the game of consequentialist thinking, thinking about how to make tradeoffs.

When it comes to sacred values, we tend to treat sacred values as absolute. Right? So if my value is that abortion is bad, then that's an absolute statement. Abortion is always bad and there are never exceptions. But so what does that mean? What that means is you're not willing to trade off your value for material gain. So there presumably there's no amount of money I hope and assume there's no amount of money I could pay you to murder someone because murdering is wrong. It's a sacred value that I certainly hold and I strongly suspect you hold too.

And so you're not willing to make a tradeoff between violating that sacred value and material gain. If you do, that would be a taboo tradeoff, right? It's taboo to make that compromise. On the other hand, sometimes we're faced between tradeoffs between competing sacred values. Sometimes I have to kill somebody in order to save my family or in order to save my country. And in that case, I have no choice but to violate a sacred value. because if I don't violate it, I'll be violating a different sacred value. So that's a tragic tradeoff.

And in a sense, that's the hardest thing to deal with in life, right? When you have competing sacred values that dictate opposite actions, then you have to give up something that is very meaningful to you and might even be central to your identity. So, Steve, I want to take this and do a follow-up question on this. One of the people you highlight in the book was Paul Jennings Hill, who was an American minister, religious extremist, and anti-abortion terrorist. Why did you choose to use his story? He ended up being executed for the murder he committed, but it's really a pretty chilling example. Abortion is one of the issues that most clearly distinguishes these different frames of reference.

Right? So usually when we vast majority of time when we talk about abortion we're we're talking about our sacred values and when we debate abortion we're debating sacred values. And I think that's why the debate doesn't go anywhere, right? Because you can't really argue about sacred values. The way to send a debate somewhere productive is to discuss consequences. That is to think about not only what the consequences to the baby would be, but what the consequences to the mother would be, what the consequences to society would be, what the consequences of any particular policy that we want to implement would be. Unless we go to that difficult and complicated discussion, we're just not going to reach any common ground.

The reason that I discussed William Jennings Brian is because it was an opportunity to discuss this sort of paragon example of how what sacred values, how they inhibit discussion, but also how they compel action and and how they how important they are the political level for motivating people to do things. Whenever there's a war for instance, it's a sort of prerequisite is that the country elicit its sacred values and make those prominent and get people to frame the situation according to their sacred values in in order to feel strongly enough that they're willing to do something like risk their own lives.

Yeah. Well, you saw that in World War II on both sides and the way that Hitler used sacred values to unite the Germans and then you also saw Winston Churchill do it as a way to ignite the the English through the sacrifices that they would have to make in order to confront the tyranny that Germany was bringing throughout the world.

Absolutely. You you name any war that's currently going on and you can see exactly the same dichotomy. Well, let's bring this a little bit closer to home. We talked about the importance of groups and belonging. I find that so many of the communities that we find ourselves in try to enforce sacred values. It could be enforcing through cancer culture. It could be you're in a fraternity and they have loyalty tests. It could be heresy trials. What do all of those through this lens of belonging or mattering do to social cohesion?

That's another great question, John. So on the positive side, they induce social cohesion, right? because they ensure that all the members of the community accept that community's sacred values and say so publicly. And that's critical, right? Like I don't want a member of my team who doesn't want my team to win. But I think your examples show that kind of enforcement of sacred values can easily go too far and tends to go too far. Right? If you have some kind of fraternity ritual that that causes pain and that serves no purpose except to except to bonds the community through awareness that they've done something that they shouldn't have done, then that's obviously a harmful consequence of something that otherwise makes sense, namely to induce a set of sacred values in the community and make explicit what they are.

Yeah. When I think about what we're talking about, it it always reminds me of the late Emil Bernau and his work on dehumanization because that that to me is like the extreme of what this can bring. I think Kurt Gray has Kurt Gray has discussed this as well in his work. But I want to talk about a couple other people's work. I've been a big fan of Don Moore and Max Aerman, you know, for decades now, and their work on ethics and decision making is something that I really tried to use during my own career when I was a business executive. You describe sacred values in that lens as cognitively seductive because it ends up simplifying decision-making.

What do you mean by that? simplicity can become dangerous. So it's important to understand that making decisions inevitably requires simplification. Right? Making decisions that matter in any sense, requires that we don't see the full complexity of the consequences of the various options because inevitably there are just too many of them. And seeing those consequences roll out over time is pretty much impossible. I mean, take any example. Take a making a decision about which car to buy. Should you buy an electric vehicle? Should you buy a gas powered vehicle? Should you buy a hybrid? Well, one question there is what's going to happen to the oil economy and what's going to happen to the battery economy?

Is Trump going to succeed in killing windmills and solar projects? If he does, then that has obvious implications for what kind of car you should buy. So in order to make a decision of any magnitude, you have to predict the future. And if there's anything that's hard to predict, it's the future. And sometimes complexity comes from all sorts of other directions, too. Do I understand battery technology? Do I know if my car's battery will last for a significant period of time? Do I really understand what damage to the environment it's going to cause? Not only to collect the chemicals and elements and minerals that go into building the battery, but to getting rid of the battery at the end too. There's all sorts of questions. So, the world is complex and we have to simplify and there are consequentialist strategies for simplification.

Decision theorists have spent decades now explaining what those are. A lot of the critical work was done in the 70s and 80s and 90s by Danny Conman and Amos Tverki pointing out the heruristics that we use in order to simplify sacred values. It strike me as another form of simplification. In fact, they're an extreme form of simplification because what they do is they allow you to ignore consequences, right? They allow you to ignore what is in a sense the most important part of a decision. You simply focus on action and have some simple rule that tells you this action is good or this action is bad. So sometimes we need those kinds of simple rules, especially if we have to make decisions really quickly or if we have to make decisions in a large group where we might have different beliefs about what the consequences will be.

Yeah, Steve. Yeah, I just wanted to stop you there because I think one of the most pro provocative arguments you make in the whole book is what you were just discussing is that many of our decisions aren't about consequences at all, but about honoring the sacred values that we've been discussing. So, I wanted to turn this into maybe a takeaway for the listeners. How can they become more aware of that distinction and so that it could possibly change the way that they live their everyday lives? Because I think this goes into how people lead, how they parent, how they vote. It it influences so many things.

I think a really good uristic tool to use is to ask yourself why am I doing this? Why do I believe this? Why is it a good idea? And if the only answer you can provide is because I've always done it this way or because it rings true, then I would say you're probably making the decision based on sacred values and you're not really thinking through the consequences. So sometimes we have to do this. If the baby is screaming or if the dog is out on the street and going to get hit by a car, then we don't have time to think things through and we have to take the action that we think that comes to mind that will resolve the emergency.

But if it's an important enough decision that it's worth taking the time for, then if we can't explain why we're doing it, then we probably haven't thought it through as much as we should and could. And this is particularly relevant when we're making decisions in the context of other people that we disagree with. So, this is something that I I really wish politicians would take seriously and that when we're thinking about our views on any hot button political issue at the moment, especially if we're not surrounded by friends, but by people who might disagree with us, it's absolutely necessary to focus the conversation on those consequences,

such as shutting the government town for instance, but unfortunately every two days there's a new example these days, but that's the latest. Yes, absolutely.

Well, maybe we can use a real life other example that brings a lot of polarization and that's climate change. Uh because th this is another one of those things where people are so much on one camp or the other. either you're fully in believing that this does exist and there reasons for it happening, scientifically proven, or you believe it's all a hoax. And this is a scenario that we really need to unite around because it has consequences that could end the world.

I couldn't agree more. So you suggest reframing as a path forward, but can you walk us through maybe in this lens of climate change, one or two examples of how that works or maybe reframing isn't the best example, but what are one or two things from your book that could help people on that topic? Mhm. Well, look, that's a topic in which I myself have been heaved to and fro in recent days. So, I actually think that people on both the left and the right of this issue have a habit of thinking about climate change in sacred values terms. So, on on the right, it's clear they just call it a hoax and deny it. and their sacred values to pursue their own interest. But on the left there, it there's also a tendency to simplify and to treat the issue as perhaps more catastrophic than it is because every question like should we be building windmills in our inside of our oceanfront properties or should we cover

our homes with solar panels? Should we be buying electric cars? Each of these is a complicated decision that has pros and cons on each side. And if you simply say, well, I'm going to protect the environment at all costs, you might end up damaging the environment, right? Like it we have to think about what the consequence of having windmills in the ocean is. We have to think about what the consequences of having to get rid of millions of huge batteries in 10 or 15 years time is even if we want to protect the environment.

So the implication is that when we're making specific decisions rather than just enforcing thoughtless kind of rules of behavior, make sure that you can generate an explanation for why this action in this case is the best. But also appreciate your explanation is not going to be complete and it's not going to be perfect. that it's not going to be the explanation that an expert on the issue would offer for instance because we just don't have the skills most of us who aren't experts to generate those kinds of explanations.

So we have to be happy with the sort of minimal explanation we're able to generate. But the other thing we have to do of course is respect expertise. is focus on those people who really do know what they're talking about and take their advice seriously.

So, one of my favorite interviews I did on the show is with Seth Goden, and we were talking about his project, the Carbon Alban Act, which brought 700 crossfunctional leaders from around throughout the world, not to take a conservative side or a liberal side, but just to try to give the facts. when they identified five culprits that are causing most of the warming that we're seeing. When I was talking to him, what he said, which I think applies to so many issues that we face, is that at the end of the day, what needs to happen is systems change. And systems change is very difficult to do because it has so many different levels. And it rarely starts from the government top down. It mostly starts from the bottom up. So when I start thinking about that and I start thinking about what that's going to really take is it's going to take some small community where people start showing up and they start doing

something differently and then it's going to spread from that point and shift people val value system. How do those things happen? Because I'm gonna go back to your other book, The Knowledge Illusion. You wrote We Never Think Alone. And to me, that's where this change starts happening is it starts when we start listening to others and not canceling them out just because they don't fit the script that we have in our mind is the right one. Like so how do those things take fire, I guess, is where I'm trying to get to.

So I've got a graduate student named Amos Molnar and we're working closely on what we call adversarial cooperation and this is an idea that has been promulgated by a number of people. Jonathan height is a big name in this area.

Yeah. And the idea is that if you really want to make good decisions, you need people with contrasting views to yours, right? You don't necessarily need them to generate ideas, to generate hypotheses, but you need them to test those ideas. Like the best way to perfect your own thinking is to describe it to someone who disagrees with you vehemently and that way you'll construct really good arguments. So our idea is that this is what society needs, right? But it's important to acknowledge that society's full of communities that operate on the basis of adversarial cooperation already.

So courts are adversarial involve adversarial processes, right? When engineers build things, there's necessarily adversarial processes because the thing has to work. So in a sense the world is the adversary. Philosophers are great at this, right? If you go to a philosophy seminar, you'll just find people disagreeing with each other left and center and that's the game to disagree. I think that there are actually lots of scientific contexts in which adversity is a respected sacred value in a way, right? disagreeing is encouraged. Now, to be honest, I think there used to be more adversarial cooperation than there is now, but nevertheless, it certainly has found its place in certain communities at certain universities. So, we have examples of this kind of process all around us. And the real problem is scaling it up.

scaling it up to a social level. There's a sense in which our government is an adversarial process. It's an adversarial process in multiple ways. So there are these different branches of government that are supposed to in a sense and they're supposed to cooperate, but they're also supposed to put limits on one another, the executive, judiciary, and legislative. One wonders these days whether that process is really working, and if not, why not? But there's also adversity within each of those institutions. So legislatures have people from different parties that you know generally have to come to some sort of agreement. And this is the problem with the two-party system, right? that it's too binary and there within each chamber there's just one party that tends to dominate and so that limits the constructive act of disagreement that is possible.

But the main point is that allowing, encouraging, fostering systems that have this property, I think is one way to achieve what you're looking for.

Okay. And another fan of mine who I've had on the show is Joshua Green, and he calls Sacred Values a heads I win tells you lose rhetorical device.

Absolutely. What is your best advice to counter when someone uses a right, a duty to immunize their position against evidence? So, there's two steps. Step one is to acknowledge their value and say just let them know you understand where they're coming from because if you don't do that, they won't listen to you. But once you but you don't have to dis agree with them. You just have to acknowledge that you understand their sacred value. And once you've done that, then you can start spelling out the consequences of their view. And some may be positive and some may be negative.

But in the end, you can at least try to foster a rich conversation about what will actually ensue if we take them seriously. And sometimes you're going to agree to the conclusion that there will be more bad consequences than good consequences. That doesn't happen too often. It's hard, if not impossible, to persuade people of things that are opposite to what they come into a situation believing. But it can happen, particularly if they're not too intrigent. Last question for you is, if you could give a book to the audience that changed how you think about decision-making, not your own, what would you recommend that they read?

Well, I saw that you interviewed Annie Duke and I really liked her book on poker. I will say for those who have not been introduced to the psychology of decisionmaking at all, I think you have to go back to the old seinal work of Conor and Tverki. And I think

reading it firsthand is incredibly enlightening because they wrote as if they were writing the Bible in the sense that every sentence had value and every demonstration was clearly thought through in its implications for how people think and the kind of mistakes we should be aware of were really clear. They there's a lot of stuff they wrote. Danny Conamman's book, what's it called? It's about two systems of thinking is not a terrible introduction to it.

And then lastly, Steve, where can people find more about your work? Well, so as you very nicely pointed out, I do have these two books that I hope people pay attention to. The first was the knowledge illusion published in 2017 and the latest is the cost of conviction. If they're interested in more they can look at my website which they can just Google Slowman lab and it'll appear. It's not a fancy site but it's got some information in it and I guess those are the best places.

Well, awesome. Well, Steve, it was such an honor to have you today on Passion Struck. Thank you for all your contributions.

Well, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure, John.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "You’re Not As Rational As You THINK | Steven Sloman"?

John R. Miles (Host), Dr. Steven Sloman (Guest).

What is "You’re Not As Rational As You THINK | Steven Sloman" about?

The discussion centers on the importance of engaging with contrasting viewpoints to enhance decision-making and critical thinking. Dr. Steven Sloman highlights that while strong convictions guide our values, they can also lead to biased thinking, emphasizing that robust arguments are forged through dialogue with those who challenge our perspectives.

What is mentioned in this John R. Miles episode?

15 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including The Cost of Conviction, The Knowledge Illusion, DEI initiatives, Paul Jennings Hill, Danny Kahneman, Amos Tversky. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "You’re Not As Rational As You THINK | Steven Sloman"?

The episode runs 45 min; the transcript is about 6,158 words in 62 timestamped sections.

More from John R. Miles

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.