Steven A Sloman
Biographic Data
| ID | 223264 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steven A Sloman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steven A |
| FAMILY NAME | Sloman |
| SIGNATURE | SLOMAN S A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8223-3788 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 187 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Zero-sum bias in politicized problem solving
Zero-sum bias refers to the tendency to believe that anything gained by one side is lost by the other when in fact win-win outcomes are available. Prior research has documented the bias in several domains but little is known about what triggers it. As politics is a hotbed of zero-sum beliefs, we hypothesized that politicizing problems would act as either a situational trigger or inhibitor for partisans and that this would lead them to propose qua…
Do We Appeal to the Knowledge of Our Political Rivals
Categorical explanations involve the use of labels to account for various properties of the explanandum. Prior research shows that the degree to which a label is perceived to be entrenched in society impacts the judged quality of the categorical explanation that invokes it regardless of how informative the explanation actually is. The aim of the present paper is to investigate whether the label entrenchment effect persists even when the label is …
Communities of Knowledge in Trouble
The community-of-knowledge framework explains the extraordinary success of the human species, despite individual members’ demonstrably shallow understanding of many topics, by appealing to outsourcing. People follow the cues of members of their community because understanding of phenomena is generally distributed across the group. Typically, communities do possess the relevant knowledge, but it is possible in principle for communities to send cue…
Not so simple! Causal mechanisms increase preference for complex explanations
Is political extremism supported by an illusion of understanding
Strategy games to improve environmental policymaking
Evidence against risk as a motivating driver of Covid-19 preventive behaviors in the United States
Does an individual's risk profile predict their social distancing and mask wearing in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic? Common sense and some health behavior theories suggest that as a perceived threat increases, an individual should be more likely to take preventive measures. We explore this hypothesis using survey responses collected from 1114 U.S. adults during April and October 2020, and find that neither perceived nor actual risk predic…
Regular and random judgements are not two sides of the same coin: Both representativeness and encoding play a role in randomness perception
The overalternating bias is that people rate sequences with an excess of alternation as more random than prescribed by information theory. There are two main explanations: the representativeness heuristic (Kahneman & Tversky Cognitive Psychology, 3, 430–454, 1972) and the implicit encoding hypothesis (Falk & Konold Psychological Review, 104, 301–318, 1997). These hypotheses are associated with different reaction times predictions. According to th…
Walking the party line: The growing role of political ideology in shaping health behavior in the United States
This study reinforces previous research that found partisan differences in engaging in behaviors with long-term health consequences by showing that these ideologically-driven differences manifest in situations where the possibility of severe illness or death is immediate and the potential societal impact is significant. The substantial implications for public health research and practice are both methodological and conceptual
Are voters influenced by the results of a consensus conference
We evaluate whether people will outsource their opinion on public policy to consensus conference participants. The ideal consensus conference brings together a representative sample of citizens and introduces them to the range of perspectives and evidence related to some policy. The sample is given the opportunity to ask questions of experts and to deliberate. Attitudes about each policy are queried before and after the conference to see if the e…
How others drive our sense of understanding of policies
Five experiments are reported to compare models of attitude formation about hot-button policy issues like climate change. In broad strokes, the deficit model states that incorrect opinions are a result of a lack of information, while the cultural cognition model states that opinions are formed to maximize congruence with the group that one affiliates with. The community of knowledge hypothesis takes an integrative position. It states that opinion…
Causal Models Drive Preference between Drugs that Treat a Focal versus Multiple Symptoms
This research examines the effects of causal beliefs on drug preference. In three studies, 374 undergraduate participants imagined that they suffered from a focal symptom and then indicated their preference between a drug claiming to treat only the focal symptom (single treatment) and a drug claiming to treat the focal symptom and a nonfocal symptom (dual treatment) they thought resulted from a common‐cause or from a different cause. Participants…
The knowledge illusion: Why We Never Think Alone
Two cognitive scientists explain how the human brain relies on the communal nature of intelligence and knowledge, constantly gathering information and expertise stored outside our mind and bodies, to overcome its shortcomings of being error prone, irrational and often ignorant,"--NoveList
Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding
People often hold extreme political attitudes about complex policies. We hypothesized that people typically know less about such policies than they think they do (the illusion of explanatory depth) and that polarized attitudes are enabled by simplistic causal models. Asking people to explain policies in detail both undermined the illusion of explanatory depth and led to attitudes that were more moderate (Experiments 1 and 2). Although these effec…
Explanation Fiends and Foes: How Mechanistic Detail Determines Understanding and Preference
People differ in their threshold for satisfactory causal understanding and therefore in the type of explanation that will engender understanding and maximize the appeal of a novel product. Explanation fiends are dissatisfied with surface understanding and desire detailed mechanistic explanations of how products work. In contrast, explanation foes derive less understanding from detailed than coarse explanations and downgrade products that are expl…
Is deontic reasoning special?
Oaksford and Chater (1994), like several theorists before them, attribute cases in which selections in the Wason 4-card task match the prescriptions of formal logic to a special kind of deontic reasoning. They propose that a utility model of card selection governs performance in deontic contexts. We show that such "logical" performance can be obtained in non-deontic contexts as well, contexts in which utility cannot explain differential card sele…
The probative value of simultaneous contradictory belief: Reply to Gigerenzer and Regier (1996)
The probative value of simultaneous contradictory belief: Reply to Gigerenzer and Regier (1996)
The empirical case for two systems of reasoning
Distinctions have been proposed between systems of reasoning for centuries. This article distills properties shared by many of these distinctions and characterizes the resulting systems in light of recent findings and theoretical developments. One system is associative because its computations reflect similarity structure and relations of temporal contiguity. The other is "rule based" because it operates on symbolic structures that have logical c…
The empirical case for two systems of reasoning
Distinctions have been proposed between systems of reasoning for centuries. This article distills properties shared by many of these distinctions and characterizes the resulting systems in light of recent findings and theoretical developments. One system is associative because its computations reflect similarity structure and relations of temporal contiguity. The other is "rule based" because it operates on symbolic structures that have logical c…
Evidence against risk as a motivating driver of Covid-19 preventive behaviors in the United States
Does an individual's risk profile predict their social distancing and mask wearing in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic? Common sense and some health behavior theories suggest that as a perceived threat increases, an individual should be more likely to take preventive measures. We explore this hypothesis using survey responses collected from 1114 U.S. adults during April and October 2020, and find that neither perceived nor actual risk predic…
How others drive our sense of understanding of policies
Five experiments are reported to compare models of attitude formation about hot-button policy issues like climate change. In broad strokes, the deficit model states that incorrect opinions are a result of a lack of information, while the cultural cognition model states that opinions are formed to maximize congruence with the group that one affiliates with. The community of knowledge hypothesis takes an integrative position. It states that opinion…
Explanation Fiends and Foes: How Mechanistic Detail Determines Understanding and Preference
People differ in their threshold for satisfactory causal understanding and therefore in the type of explanation that will engender understanding and maximize the appeal of a novel product. Explanation fiends are dissatisfied with surface understanding and desire detailed mechanistic explanations of how products work. In contrast, explanation foes derive less understanding from detailed than coarse explanations and downgrade products that are expl…
Strategy games to improve environmental policymaking
Are voters influenced by the results of a consensus conference
We evaluate whether people will outsource their opinion on public policy to consensus conference participants. The ideal consensus conference brings together a representative sample of citizens and introduces them to the range of perspectives and evidence related to some policy. The sample is given the opportunity to ask questions of experts and to deliberate. Attitudes about each policy are queried before and after the conference to see if the e…
Causal Models Drive Preference between Drugs that Treat a Focal versus Multiple Symptoms
This research examines the effects of causal beliefs on drug preference. In three studies, 374 undergraduate participants imagined that they suffered from a focal symptom and then indicated their preference between a drug claiming to treat only the focal symptom (single treatment) and a drug claiming to treat the focal symptom and a nonfocal symptom (dual treatment) they thought resulted from a common‐cause or from a different cause. Participants…
Is deontic reasoning special?
Oaksford and Chater (1994), like several theorists before them, attribute cases in which selections in the Wason 4-card task match the prescriptions of formal logic to a special kind of deontic reasoning. They propose that a utility model of card selection governs performance in deontic contexts. We show that such "logical" performance can be obtained in non-deontic contexts as well, contexts in which utility cannot explain differential card sele…
The probative value of simultaneous contradictory belief: Reply to Gigerenzer and Regier (1996)
The probative value of simultaneous contradictory belief: Reply to Gigerenzer and Regier (1996)
The empirical case for two systems of reasoning
Distinctions have been proposed between systems of reasoning for centuries. This article distills properties shared by many of these distinctions and characterizes the resulting systems in light of recent findings and theoretical developments. One system is associative because its computations reflect similarity structure and relations of temporal contiguity. The other is "rule based" because it operates on symbolic structures that have logical c…
Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding
People often hold extreme political attitudes about complex policies. We hypothesized that people typically know less about such policies than they think they do (the illusion of explanatory depth) and that polarized attitudes are enabled by simplistic causal models. Asking people to explain policies in detail both undermined the illusion of explanatory depth and led to attitudes that were more moderate (Experiments 1 and 2). Although these effec…
Explanation Fiends and Foes: How Mechanistic Detail Determines Understanding and Preference
People differ in their threshold for satisfactory causal understanding and therefore in the type of explanation that will engender understanding and maximize the appeal of a novel product. Explanation fiends are dissatisfied with surface understanding and desire detailed mechanistic explanations of how products work. In contrast, explanation foes derive less understanding from detailed than coarse explanations and downgrade products that are expl…
Causal Models Drive Preference between Drugs that Treat a Focal versus Multiple Symptoms
This research examines the effects of causal beliefs on drug preference. In three studies, 374 undergraduate participants imagined that they suffered from a focal symptom and then indicated their preference between a drug claiming to treat only the focal symptom (single treatment) and a drug claiming to treat the focal symptom and a nonfocal symptom (dual treatment) they thought resulted from a common‐cause or from a different cause. Participants…
The knowledge illusion: Why We Never Think Alone
Two cognitive scientists explain how the human brain relies on the communal nature of intelligence and knowledge, constantly gathering information and expertise stored outside our mind and bodies, to overcome its shortcomings of being error prone, irrational and often ignorant,"--NoveList
How others drive our sense of understanding of policies
Five experiments are reported to compare models of attitude formation about hot-button policy issues like climate change. In broad strokes, the deficit model states that incorrect opinions are a result of a lack of information, while the cultural cognition model states that opinions are formed to maximize congruence with the group that one affiliates with. The community of knowledge hypothesis takes an integrative position. It states that opinion…
Regular and random judgements are not two sides of the same coin: Both representativeness and encoding play a role in randomness perception
The overalternating bias is that people rate sequences with an excess of alternation as more random than prescribed by information theory. There are two main explanations: the representativeness heuristic (Kahneman & Tversky Cognitive Psychology, 3, 430–454, 1972) and the implicit encoding hypothesis (Falk & Konold Psychological Review, 104, 301–318, 1997). These hypotheses are associated with different reaction times predictions. According to th…
Walking the party line: The growing role of political ideology in shaping health behavior in the United States
This study reinforces previous research that found partisan differences in engaging in behaviors with long-term health consequences by showing that these ideologically-driven differences manifest in situations where the possibility of severe illness or death is immediate and the potential societal impact is significant. The substantial implications for public health research and practice are both methodological and conceptual
Are voters influenced by the results of a consensus conference
We evaluate whether people will outsource their opinion on public policy to consensus conference participants. The ideal consensus conference brings together a representative sample of citizens and introduces them to the range of perspectives and evidence related to some policy. The sample is given the opportunity to ask questions of experts and to deliberate. Attitudes about each policy are queried before and after the conference to see if the e…
Is political extremism supported by an illusion of understanding
Strategy games to improve environmental policymaking
Evidence against risk as a motivating driver of Covid-19 preventive behaviors in the United States
Does an individual's risk profile predict their social distancing and mask wearing in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic? Common sense and some health behavior theories suggest that as a perceived threat increases, an individual should be more likely to take preventive measures. We explore this hypothesis using survey responses collected from 1114 U.S. adults during April and October 2020, and find that neither perceived nor actual risk predic…
Not so simple! Causal mechanisms increase preference for complex explanations
Communities of Knowledge in Trouble
The community-of-knowledge framework explains the extraordinary success of the human species, despite individual members’ demonstrably shallow understanding of many topics, by appealing to outsourcing. People follow the cues of members of their community because understanding of phenomena is generally distributed across the group. Typically, communities do possess the relevant knowledge, but it is possible in principle for communities to send cue…
Zero-sum bias in politicized problem solving
Zero-sum bias refers to the tendency to believe that anything gained by one side is lost by the other when in fact win-win outcomes are available. Prior research has documented the bias in several domains but little is known about what triggers it. As politics is a hotbed of zero-sum beliefs, we hypothesized that politicizing problems would act as either a situational trigger or inhibitor for partisans and that this would lead them to propose qua…
Do We Appeal to the Knowledge of Our Political Rivals
Categorical explanations involve the use of labels to account for various properties of the explanandum. Prior research shows that the degree to which a label is perceived to be entrenched in society impacts the judged quality of the categorical explanation that invokes it regardless of how informative the explanation actually is. The aim of the present paper is to investigate whether the label entrenchment effect persists even when the label is …
Psychology (14 works) · Cognitive psychology (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Political science (7 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (5 works)