Steven Sloman Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences

Steven Sloman is a Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University.

Steven studies how people think: how we reason, make decisions and form attitudes and beliefs.

People have some crazy opinions. Generally, these are the opinions that we disagree with.

The standard view in both academia and the wider culture is that people have such opinions due to knowledge deficits; they are lacking information.

On this view, providing information and critical reasoning skills is the best way to get opinions to converge, because they’ll converge to the truth.

There is already strong reason to doubt this deficit model. I provide more in the form of evidence that knowledge is unrelated to attitudes about issues, including climate change.

In contrast, a person’s ideology influences both their attitudes and their sense of understanding. A competitor to the deficit model, the cultural cognition view, explains the effect of ideology on attitudes, but does not address the sense of understanding.

I follow the cultural cognition view in proposing that people outsource much of their reasoning to their communities; I add that it is the resulting sense of understanding that mediates their attitudes.

The relevant reasoning is both causal (based on evidence) and deontic (based on protected values), a distinction people are rarely aware of despite its importance.

Credit: Steven Sloman