On Wednesday, May 20, Dr. Steven Sloman’s book, “The Cost of Conviction: How Our Deepest Values Lead Us Astray,” came out, published by the MIT Press. 

Explaining the foundations of judgment and decision-making in this book, Sloman described, will provide insight into fields of decision science, as well as social and cognitive psychology. He breaks down two main strategies for decision making: consequentialism and the use of sacred values. 

Consequentialism, as the name suggests, assumes that people make choices to maximize consequences. This cost-benefit analysis approach is the typical metric for judging the quality of decisions. Sacred values, however, refer to values associated with actions, such as whether doing something is “right” or “wrong.”

“So, we have these two different strategies for making decisions,” Sloman synthesized. “One of the themes of the book is that we rely more on sacred values than we should and that this is the cause of many of society's ills, like polarization, war, and the inability [of people] to communicate with others.”

Sacred values help people define social identities, dictate how people relate to each other, and shape community-building, thereby affecting decisions on a large scale. This concept also connects to Sloman’s previous book, “The Knowledge Illusion.” The title refers to people thinking they understand how something works better than they actually do; only when they try to explain it, do they realize how little they know. Because people tend to think in terms of sacred values, they may not be as informed on the tangible consequences of a policy or idea as they initially believed.

Sloman’s book will delve into leading research in the area of decision-making, as well as theory, philosophy, storytelling, and mathematics. “It takes a multiplicity of approaches, and it's trying to capture the reader from different perspectives. Hopefully, I'll find a perspective for each reader within,” he shared.

Sloman added, “It reports enough data that I feel confident saying the claims are empirically grounded.”

“The Cost of Conviction” is available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook forms. It can be purchased at the MIT Press Bookstore, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other such bookstores.