Join us on Thursday, May 29th as we host Steven Sloman, who will be discussing his latest book, The Cost of Conviction. Signed copies of Steve's book are available for purchase!
About the book:
A timely and important perspective on how people frame decisions and how relying on sacred values unwittingly leads to social polarization.
When you are faced with a decision, do you consider the best outcome, or do you consider your deepest values about which actions are appropriate? The Cost of Conviction contrasts these two primary strategies for making decisions: consequentialism or prioritizing one’s sacred values. Steven Sloman argues that, while both modes of decision making are necessary tools for a good decision maker, people err by deploying sacred values more often than they should, especially when it comes to sociopolitical issues. As a result, we oversimplify, grow disgusted and angry, and act in ways that contribute to social polarization. In this book, Sloman provides a new understanding of today’s societal ills and grounds that understanding in science.
Drawing on historical and current examples of the two decision-making strategies in action, the author provides a thorough overview of the psychology of decision making, including work on judgment, conscious and unconscious decision-making processes, the roles of emotion, and even an analysis of habit and addiction. With its unique emphasis on sacred values, The Cost of Conviction is an eye-opening must-read for all decision makers, especially those who wish to understand judgment, social decision making, and leadership.
About the author:
Steven Sloman received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1990 and completed his post-doctoral research at University of Michigan. He began teaching at Brown in 1992. Steven is a cognitive scientist who studies how people think. He has studied how our habits of thought influence the way we see the world, how the different systems that constitute thought interact to produce conclusions, conflict, and conversation, and how our construal of how the world works influences how we evaluate events and decide what actions to take. The focus of his current research is collective cognition, how we think as a community, a topic elaborated on in his book with Phil Fernbach The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. His work has been discussed in the New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Vice, the Financial Times, the Economist, Scientific American, National Geographic, and more. He is former Editor-in-Chief of Cognition: The International Journal of Cognitive Science and currently on the Editorial Board of Decision and Psychological Science.
