Sacred Values: How Our Deepest Convictions Lead Us Astray | Dr. Steven Sloman – EP 715

0:00coming up next on passion struck 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 welcome to passion struck i'm your host john miles this is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters each week i sit down with change makers, creators, scientists and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning heal what hurts and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming whether you're designing your future developing as a leader or seeking deeper alignment in your life this show is your invitation to grow with

1:05purpose and act with intention because the secret to a life of deep purpose connection and impact is choosing to live like you matter hey friends and welcome back to episode 715 a passion struck we're now into week two of our new series the meaning makers where we're exploring how humans construct meaning and what happens when those structures begin to fail over the past few episodes we've been examining what sustains a life once momentum is no longer the problem and meaning becomes the question last week we kicked off the series with dr steven post exploring meaning as a biological and relational necessity how compassion contribution and unlimited love don't just feel good but stabilize the human system itself then world-renowned poet mark nebo went inward into presence acceptance and the discipline of living truthfully once the external metrics of success stop working but today we turn

2:07to a more uncomfortable and essential question what happens when the very beliefs that give our lives meaning begin to harden into certainty my guest today is dr steven slumman steven is a professor at brown university and one of the world's leading experts on how humans think reason and form beliefs his work explores why we hold conviction so fiercely and why those convictions when left and examined can quietly fracture communities distort judgment and narrow our capacity for understanding and today's conversation we explore why sacred values bind us and can divide us how belonging shapes what feels right or wrong why certainty is psychologically comforting but socially costly and how learning to think and trade-offs rather than absolutes may be one of the most important skills of our time before we dive in the click note on a project that mirrors the themes of inherent worth my new children's book you matter luma is a bridge to that truth or a reminder that your significance isn't earned by your performance it's a fact of your existence you can

3:12preorder it now at Barnes and Noble or you matter luma dot com if this episode resonates please share it with someone navigating a similar season and if you haven't yet a five-star rating review on apple podcast or Spotify helps these conversations reach the people who need it most you can also catch the full visual experience on our youtube channels passion struck clips in john our miles if you've ever felt certain only to realize later that certainly came at a cost to your relationships your curiosity or your sense of shared reality then this conversation is for you now let's begin the meaning makers with steven slimman thank you for choosing passion struck and choosing me to be your hosting guide and your journey to creating an intentional life now let that journey begin hey friends there's something about march that makes you want to reset your space for me that started in the kitchen clearing out what i didn't need and upgrading what i use every single day that's when i brought in caraway what i love is how simple caraway makes everything the ceramic coating means food just lifts right off so i'm using less oil clean up take

4:16seconds and cooking actually feels enjoyable again but it's not just performance it's the intentional design the storage system keeps everything organized and i've become a lot more mindful about what i bring into my home and that's why it's so important that caraway is third-party tested and made with high standards which just gives me more confidence in what i'm using every day it's one of those upgrades you feel immediately caraway's cookware set is a favorite for a reason it can save you up to two hundred thirty dollars versus buying the items individually plus if you visit carawayhome.com slash passion struck you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase the steel is exclusive for our listeners so visit carawayhome.com slash passion struck or use code passion struck at checkout caraway nontoxic kitchenware made modern i am so excited today to welcome dr steven slum and welcome steve to passion struck how are you

5:20today 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 there 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

6:22of 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 fore when we're thinking about important social and moral issues namely whether the actions we're 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 as well as they think they do and you show this simply by

7:28asking people how well they understand a common object say like a toaster or a zipper or a toilet and then ask the 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 obama care say they'll think they have decent understanding when you ask them to explain it they 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

8:31from their communities about why the the policy is consistent with their values or inconsistent with their values of 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 just turned in my manuscript to earlier this week for my 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 probably made you aware of your own sacred

9:35values and how they shape your own decisions for good or bad could you possibly share an example that may be changed? Sure so the brand 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

10:36the 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 bored in this country should afford you citizenship but certain things were clarified for me in the process and by the way congratulations on your new book well thank you you turn in the manuscript and then it takes 12 months to 18 months for them to get it to print so it's gonna 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 Joan of Arc why do you think stories of extreme conviction like those still resonate so powerful today

11:43I 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

12:47other 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 friend of mine who 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 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 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

13:54they'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 their habits that we think about their 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 Fletz's work as well as some of the work that Lori Santos and

14:57others 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've 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 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

16:02time democracy was a sacred value and free speech was a sacred value and if you're a Republican then family values are sacred value and if you're a Democrat then there are other things doing little harm is a sacred value every group even hockey teams have sacred values in a way right when 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

17:08teams that we play in that we want to beat them 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 have Republicans and Democrats to find 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 guys community so we choose values which maximally distinguish us and we start focusing on those values which maximally distinguish us so that our self-definition 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

18:09especially his work around Rosetta, 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 in 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 and young men especially in the United States are changing so rapidly I think this has been shown in the book Adrift that Scott Galloway put out a couple years ago but it's really in the whole movement that in November 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

19:12out 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 think that's crazy but if they see 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

20:17to 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 before we continue I want to pause on something important listening to a conversation about belief certainty and sacred values is one thing living with that awareness especially in a world that rewards speed slogans and outrage is another that tension between belonging and understanding conviction and humility is exactly what this conversation with Stephen Sloeman is about meaning doesn't come from being right it comes from being responsible with what we believe that's why each episode in the Meaningmakers series is paired with reflection tools inside the ignited life my sub-stack to help you build the internal architecture to think more clearly asking questions

21:20where am I trading a value of sacred to avoid engaging trade-offs what beliefs feel untouchable and why am I protecting meaning or protecting identity because meaning isn't something you declare it's something you practice carefully courageously and over time you can join us at the ignitedlife.net now a quick break from our sponsors thank you for supporting those who support the show you're listening to passion struck on the passion struck network now back to my conversation with Stephen Sloeman it is a really sad state of affair 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 to trade-offs in the book and you discuss taboo trade-offs and tragic trade-offs what are the differences can i just make one quick comment about young men before we before i try to

22:23yeah absolutely i just i do want to say that i don't think sacred values are the whole story 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 rising 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 were facing people are

23:26just not willing to face the complexity of life so back to your question tragic versus taboo trade-offs 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 trade-off between price and quality and when you're thinking in consequentialist terms you always have to make these kinds of trade-offs that's actually the game of consequentialist thinking thinking about how to make trade-offs when it comes to sacred values we tend to treat sacred values as absolute right so if my value is that abortion is bad

24:28then 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 game 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 trade-off between violating that sacred value and material game if you do that would be a taboo trade-off right it's taboo to make that compromise and the other hand sometimes we're faced between trade-offs between competing sacred values sometimes I have to kill somebody in order to save my family or in order

25:36to 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 trade-off 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

26:36abortion 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 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

27:36we 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 at the political level for motivating people to do things whenever there's 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 order to feel

28:36strongly 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 bring throughout the world absolutely 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 your in a fraternity and they have loyalty tests they could be heresy trials what do all of those

29:40through this lens of belonging or mattering due to social cohesion that's another great question John so I'm the positive side they induce social cohesion right because they ensure that all the members of the community accept that community 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

30:40except to accept 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 Bruno and his work on dehumanization because that to me is like the extreme of what this can bring I think Kirk Gray is Kirk 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 Azerman 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 at a business executive you describe sacred values and that lens is

31:45cognitively seductive because it ends up simplifying decision-making but 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 card 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

32:51economy is Trump going to succeed in killing the 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 then 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

33:58spent decades now explaining what those are a lot of the critical work was done in the 70s and 80s and 90s by Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky pointing out the heuristics 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 the 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

34:58what the consequences will be yeah I just wanted to stop you there because I think one of the most provocative arguments you make in the whole book is what you're 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 a 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 influences so many things I think a really good heuristic 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

36:07the 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 really wish politicians would take seriously and that when we're thinking about

37:10our 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 down 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 because 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 the 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

38:14because it has consequences that could end the world and 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 what are one or two things from your book that could help people on that topic well look that's a topic in which I myself have been heave 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 the right it's clear they just call it a hoax and deny it and their sacred values to pursue their own interest

39:16but on the left 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 ocean front 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

40:25that 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

41:26interviews I did on this show is with Seth Godin and we were talking about his project the Carbon Albinac which brought 700 cross-functional 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

42:26people without value system how do those things happen because I'm going to 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 five 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 Amush 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 Hight 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

43:31but 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

44:32find people disagreeing with each other left from 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

45:38and 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's within the 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

46:38phantomine who I've had on the show is Joshua Green and he calls sacred values ahead as I win tells you lose rhetorical device 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 disagree 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

47:47conclusion that there will be more bad consequences than good consequences so that doesn't happen too off and 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 intransigent and then Steve I have one or two fun questions for you sure if you could redesign how political debates are conducted what's the first change you would consider making so I think there are some productive political debates so I have watched the British House of Commons on occasion and it can be both fun and enlightening that is entertaining isn't it but I guess following from the ideas that we've been discussing what I would want to do is make sure that people stop sloganizing right there has to be more direct so what I find when I watch say

48:57presidential debates is that the debaters just express their values and leave it at that and others don't really take issue with it because there's not much to say when you disagree with someone's values other than you disagree with their value but that's not a discussion that goes anywhere productive so forcing people to say why and how this thing works right could lead to actual interchange where people are actually responding to one another hopefully filtering out the wheat and our filtering out the chaff leaving the wheat as the product of the conversation I used to be a senior executive at Dell and while I was there we bought to grow systems the company Ross Pro founded and I had the opportunity to meet Ross a number of times

49:58and I go back to the debates that he was in with Bill Clinton and President Bush the first and it was so interesting because he took a completely different angle than the other two and I think it shocked a lot of people and how he did it and I wish we had more people who went into the debates like he did focused on solutions and change rather than staying rigid in their lane 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 I'd poker I will say for those who have not been introduced to the psychology of decision-making at all I think you have to go back to the old seminal work of Condomin Tversky and I think reading it firsthand is incredibly enlightening because they

51:00wrote as if they were writing the Bible in the sense that every sentence had value and every demonstration was clearly thought through and 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 that economist book what's it called 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 slum and 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

52:04well 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 that brings us to the close of today's conversation with Steven slum and what stayed with me most is this meaning doesn't disappear when we loosen our grip uncertainty it deepens when we're willing to examine the cost of what we believe sacred values help us belong but when they go unquestion they can quietly narrow our thinking harden our identities and bind us to consequences we never intended Steven reminds us that wisdom isn't the absence of conviction it's the ability to hold conviction while remaining open to trade-offs complexity and responsibility and that brings us to the next step in the the meaning maker series if today was about how beliefs form and how certainly shapes our sense of meaning the next we turn to what happens when those beliefs collide with real world decisions in my upcoming episode on Thursday I'm joined by Alexemus who's work focuses on decision-making under pressure and a powerful idea known as the winner's curse the phenomenon where people win

53:09by overpaying over committing or overreaching only to discover that the victory itself carried hidden cost if Steven slum and helped us understand the cognitive architecture of belief Alexemus will help us explore the behavioral architecture of choice and why so many of us are exhausted not because we failed but because we succeeded at something that asked too much don't succumb to the sunk cost fallacy so the sunk cost fallacy is this idea that I've already done something I've already gone down this path I might as well keep going even though it's looking like a bad decision don't succumb to that sunk cost fallacy always take a moment think is the next step if I hadn't gone into this decision to begin with if I hadn't paid money to invest in the stock if I hadn't taken those that one class in that topic would I still do that next thing if the answer is no stop do something else just this is one of the most important things that behavioral science has taught us before you move on with your day I'd invite you to pause and ask

54:12where in my life might I be protecting certainty or chasing a win without fully counting the cost if you want support applying these ideas you can join me inside the ignitedlife.net where each episode in the series is paired with reflection tools designed to help you integrate insight into action as we continue the meaning makers remember significance isn't built by winning at all cost it's built by choosing what actually sustained you I'm John Miles you've been passion struck