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

0:00Coming up next on PassionStruck. 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 PassionStruck. 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 changemakers, 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.

0:57Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter.

1:20Hey friends, and welcome back to episode 715 of 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. Stephen 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.

1:54Then, world-renowned poet Mark Nepo went inward into presence, acceptance, and the discipline of living truthfully once the external metrics of success stopped working. But today, we turn to a more uncomfortable and essential question. What happens when the very beliefs that give our life's meaning begin to harden into certainty? My guest today is Dr. Stephen Sloman. Stephen 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 convictions so fiercely and why those convictions, when left unexamined, can quietly fracture communities, distort judgment, and narrow our capacity for understanding.

2:39In 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 in trade-offs rather than absolutes may be one of the most important skills of our time. Before we dive in, a quick 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, a reminder that your significance isn't earned by your performance. It's a fact of your existence. You can pre-order it now at Barnes and Noble or YouMatterLuma.com.

3:15If this episode resonates, please share it with someone navigating a similar season. And if you haven't yet, a five-star rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify helps these conversations reach the people who need it most. You can also catch the full visual experience on our YouTube channels, PassionStruckClips and John R. Miles. If you've ever felt certain, only to realize later that certainty 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 Stephen Slumman. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.

3:50Now, let that journey begin.

3:57I am so excited today to welcome Dr. Stephen Slumman. Welcome, Steve, to PassionStruck. 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.

4:38You'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.

5:33But 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 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.

6:20And 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 policy is consistent with their values or inconsistent with their values and why it outrages them.

7:25So 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 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 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 values and how they shape your own decisions for good or bad.

8:22Could you possibly share an example that maybe 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.

9:13So, 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. Well, thank you. You turn in the manuscript and then it takes 12 months to 18 months for them to get it to print.

10:02So 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 Joan 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.

11:27The 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 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. 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.

12:29I 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.

13:19So 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 Waltman's, and The Science of Mattering, Gordon Flett's work, as well as some of the work that Laurie 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?

14:06Well, 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 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.

14:58And 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? 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?

15:56There's a clear distinction there. But you can see this in all kinds of communities. The obvious 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-definition becomes a sort of anti-definition of the other side.

16:45Yeah, as I was thinking through this myself, I kept going back to some of the work of Malcolm Gladwell, especially his work around Rosetto, 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, the 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.

17:29I think this has been shown in the book Adrift that Scott Galloway put out a couple of 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.

18:21Sometimes it goes overboard, clearly. When they feel that the 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 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.

19:26Before we continue, I want to pause on something important. Listening to a conversation about belief, certainty, and sacred values is one thing. Living without 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 Sloman 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 Meaning Makers series is paired with reflection tools inside the Ignited Life of my substack, to help you build the internal architecture to think more clearly, asking questions like, where am I treating a value is sacred to avoid engaging trade-offs.

20:06What 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 theignitedlife.net. Now, a quick break from our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

20:27You're listening to PassionStruck on the PassionStruck Network. Now, back to my conversation with Stephen Sloman. 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 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 I try to answer the question? Yeah, absolutely. I do want to say that I don't think sacred values are the whole story there, right?

21:13There'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.

22:09People are just 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 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.

22:58When 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 they're 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 gain.

23:57If you do, that would be a taboo trade-off, right? It's taboo to make that compromise. On 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 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 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.

24:56So 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 talking about our sacred values. And when we debate abortion, we're debating sacred values.

25:47And 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 Bryan is because it was an opportunity to discuss this sort of paragon example of what sacred values, how they inhibit discussion, but also how they compel action and how important they are at the political level for motivating people to do things.

26:59Whenever 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 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 You also saw Winston Churchill do it as a way to ignite the English through the sacrifices that they would have to make in order to confront the tyranny that Germany was bringing throughout the world.

27:47Absolutely. 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?

28:39Because 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. If you have some kind of fraternity ritual that causes pain and that serves no purpose except to bond 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.

29:40namely 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 always reminds me of the late Emil Bruneau and his work on dehumanization, because that to me is like the extreme of what this can bring. I think 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 Hazerman 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.

30:24You describe sacred values and 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 making a decision about which car to buy.

31:18Should 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?

32:08Do 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 Kahneman and Amos Tversky pointing out the heuristics that we use in order to simplify.