Contemporary Authors

• Similarity and Symbols in Human Thinking MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1998
• Causal Models; How People Think about the World and Its Alternatives Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2005
• The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2017

1.  The knowledge illusion : why we never think alone LCCN 2016036297 Type of material Book Personal name Sloman, Steven A., author. Main title The knowledge illusion : why we never think alone / Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach. Published/Produced New York : Riverhead Books, 2017. Description 296 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780399184352 CALL NUMBER B105.T54 S56 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2.  Causal models : how people think about the world and its alternatives LCCN 2004031000 Type of material Book Personal name Sloman, Steven A. Main title Causal models : how people think about the world and its alternatives / Steven Sloman. Published/Created Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2005. Description xi, 212 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0195183118 (hardcover) 9780195183115 Links Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip056/2004031000.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0635/2004031000-d.html Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0722/2004031000-b.html CALL NUMBER BF39 .S56 2005 LANDOVR Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3.  Similarity and symbols in human thinking LCCN 98007439 Type of material Book Main title Similarity and symbols in human thinking / edited by Steven A. Sloman and Lance J. Rips. Published/Created Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1998. Description 221 p. : ill. ; 26 cm. ISBN 0262692147 (pbk. : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER BF311 .S5676 1998 LANDOVR Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 4.  Louise Bourgeois LCCN 87050485 Type of material Book Personal name Bourgeois, Louise, 1911-2010. Main title Louise Bourgeois / [with] essays by Stuart Morgan ; [photography, Peter Bellamy, Alan Finkelman, Steven Sloman]. Published/Created Cincinnati, Ohio : Taft Museum, 1987. Description [64] p. : ill., port. ; 31 cm. ISBN 0915577135 (pbk.) CALL NUMBER NB237.B65 A4 1987 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 5.  Philip Guston : paintings 1969-1980 LCCN 83150600 Type of material Book Personal name Guston, Philip, 1913-1980. Main title Philip Guston : paintings 1969-1980 / [edited by Nicholas Serota ; designed by Richard Hollis ; photographs by Steven Sloman ... et al.]. Published/Created [London] : Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1982 (1983 printing) Description 71 p. : ill. ; 27 cm. ISBN 0854880593 CALL NUMBER ND237.G8 A4 1983 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Elsevier - https://www.journals.elsevier.com/cognition/editorial-board/steven-sloman

  Steven Sloman

  Editor-in-Chief, Cognition
  Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, 02912, USA
  Steven Sloman is a Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University where he has worked since 1992. He did his PhD in Psychology at Stanford University from 1986-1990 and then did post-doctoral research for two years at the University of Michigan. Steven is a cognitive scientist who studies how people think. He has studied how our habits of thought influence the way we see the world, how the different systems that constitute thought interact to produce conclusions, conflict, and conversation, and how our construal of how the world works influences how we evaluate events and decide what action to take. His book with Phil Fernbach, The Illusion of Knowledge: Why We Never Think Alone, will be out in March, 2017.

• Brown University, Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences Website - https://www.brown.edu/Departments/CLPS/people/steven-sloman

  Steven Sloman

  Professor
  Steven_Sloman@brown.edu
  (401) 863-7595
  Office Location: 
  Metcalf 333
  Office Hours: 
  Thursdays 2-3pm
  Research Focus: 
  Causal reasoning, decision making, categorization
  Steven Sloman received his B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1986 and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1990. He is a computationally oriented cognitive scientist who studies how people think. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the journal Cognition. Steve has studied how people categorize the world and the relation between our names for things and our thoughts about things. He has also studied inductive inference, judgments of probability, decision making, and reasoning. Much of his work in recent years has focused on how people reason causally about the world. These interests are reflected in his book, Causal Models: How We Think About the World and Its Alternatives, published by Oxford University Press in 2005.
  His current focus concerns ignorance and the community of knowledge. The illusion of explanatory depth is the finding that people think they understand how things work better than they in fact do. Steve believes this illusion of understanding emerges because people fail to distinguish what others know from what they themselves know. They think they understand more than they do because they confuse other people’s knowledge for their own. Such confusion arises because much of what we know doesn’t reside in heads. Rather, it resides in the community of knowledge that we participate in. These ideas are spelled out in a popular book written with Steve’s ex-student Phil Fernbach: The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone (Riverhead Press, 2017).

  CV:

• Amazon -

  Steven Sloman is a professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown University. He is the editor in chief of the journal Cognition. He lives with his wife in Providence, Rhode Island. His two children have flown the coop.

Sloman, Steven & Philip Fernbach. The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

Mary Ann Hughes
142.4 (Mar. 1, 2017): p94.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Sloman, Steven & Philip Fernbach. The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. Riverhead. Mar. 2017. 304p. illus. notes. index. ISBN 9780399184352. $28; ebk. ISBN 9780399184345. PSYCH
We wander around in a fog of unknowing, argue Sloman (cognitive, linguistic, & psychological sciences, Brown Univ.; editor in chief, Cognition) and Fernbach (marketing, Leeds Sch. of Business, Univ. of Colorado). We depend on a web of experts and the technology they've created to keep our world going. Even Paleolithic societies had specialists--shamans, flint knappers, etc. The downside is that we tend to think that we know more than we do. Most people, for example, say that they understand how a toilet works or why a certain social policy should be enacted. But when asked to describe plumbing or explain why they advocate a policy, they are unable to do so. This is called the "Illusion of Explanatory Depth." It can lead to flooded bathrooms and wars. Sloman and Fernbach offer suggestions for minimizing the damage that this can cause, but, interestingly enough, this book illustrates the problem of specialization. The authors apparently aren't aware of some of the classic work done on values change by social psychologists. VERDICT General readers who like the work of Malcolm Gladwell will enjoy this book.--Mary Ann Hughes, Shelton, WA
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Hughes, Mary Ann. "Sloman, Steven & Philip Fernbach. The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone." Library Journal, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 94+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483702177&it=r&asid=da18f5304b6da8ba93a61bfbb02f902b. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A483702177

Mind meld; Cognitive science

423.9035 (Apr. 8, 2017): p75(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. By Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach. Riverhead; 296 pages. Macmillan
DO YOU know how a toilet works? What about a bicycle, or a zipper? Most people can provide half answers at best. They struggle to explain basic inventions, let alone more complex and abstract ones. Yet somehow, in spite of people's ignorance, they created and navigate the modern world. A new book, "The Knowledge Illusion" sets out to tackle this apparent paradox: how can human thinking be so powerful, yet so shallow?
Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, two cognitive scientists, draw on evolutionary theory and psychology. They argue that the mind has evolved to do the bare minimum that improves the fitness of its host. Because humans are a social species and evolved in the context of collaboration, wherever possible, abilities have been outsourced. As a result, people are individually rather limited thinkers and store little information in their own heads. Much knowledge is instead spread through the community--whose members do not often realise that this is the case.
The authors call this the illusion of understanding, and they demonstrate it with a simple experiment. Subjects are asked to rate their understanding of something, then to write a detailed account of it, and finally to rate their understanding again. The self-assessments almost invariably drop. The authors see this effect everywhere, from toilets and bicycles to complex policy issues. The illusion exists, they argue, because humans evolved as part of a hive mind, and are so intuitively adept at co-operation that the lines between minds become blurred. Economists and psychologists talk about the "curse of knowledge": people who know something have a hard time imagining someone else who does not. The illusion of knowledge works the other way round: people think they know something because others know it.
The hive mind, with its seamless interdependence and expertise-sharing, once helped humans hunt mammoths and now sends them into space. But in politics it causes problems. Using a toilet without understanding it is harmless, but changing the health-care system without understanding it is not. Yet people often have strong opinions about issues they understand little about. And on social media, surrounded by like-minded friends and followers, opinions are reinforced and become more extreme. It is hard to reason with someone under the illusion that their beliefs are thought through, and simply presenting facts is unlikely to change beliefs when those beliefs are rooted in the values and groupthink of a community.
The authors tentatively suggest that making people confront the illusion of understanding will temper their opinions, but this could have the opposite effect--people respond badly to feeling foolish. Messrs Sloman and Fernbach show how deep the problem runs, but are short on ideas to fix it.
"The Knowledge Illusion" is at once both obvious and profound: the limitations of the mind are no surprise, but the problem is that people so rarely think about them. However, while the illusion certainly exists, its significance is overstated. The authors are Ptolemaic in their efforts to make it central to human psychology, when really the answer to their first question--how can human thought be so powerful, yet so shallow?--is the hive mind. Human ignorance is more fundamental and more consequential than the illusion of understanding. But still, the book profits from its timing. In the context of partisan bubbles and fake news, the authors bring a necessary shot of humility: be sceptical of your own knowledge, and the wisdom of your crowd.
The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.
By Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Mind meld; Cognitive science." The Economist, 8 Apr. 2017, p. 75(US). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA493932701&it=r&asid=2fac046563d9ec341c617d1fc45fa46c. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A493932701

Massively intelligent

Gary Drevitch
50.2 (March-April 2017): p44.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Sussex Publishers, Inc.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/
THE KNOWLEDGE ILLUSION Why We Never Think Alone STEVEN SLOMAN and PHILIPL FERNBACH
Hardly anyone can accurately explain how a zipper works. And yet we've cracked the atom and explored deep space. A new book explains how we manage it.
IN A CLASSIC Monty Python sketch, panelists on the talk show "How to Do It" promise to teach viewers how to split an atom, construct a box girder bridge, and irrigate the Sahara "to make vast new areas of land cultivatable." But first, how to play the flute: John Cleese picks up the instrument, points to it, and declares, "You blow there, and you move your fingers up and down here."
As Steven Sloman and Philip Fembach relate with less silliness in The Knowledge Illusion, most of us have no deeper understanding of how everyday devices like a toilet, a zipper, or a coffeemaker actually work, to say nothing of watches, cell phones, or space probes. And yet until we're actually asked, by researchers like the authors, to describe how a toilet functions-and they helpfully provide an elegant description-most of us assume that we do understand. This gap between what we know and what we think we know is known as the illusion of explanatory depth.
"Our point is not that people are ignorant," Sloman and Fembach write. "It's that people are more ignorant than they think they are." In fact, we know just enough to get by.

Sloman, a psychologist at Brown and the editor of the journal Cognition, and Fembach, a cognitive scientist at the University of Colorado, explore the paradox that while individual humans may be fairly ignorant of how the world works, we're collectively capable of brilliance. Their breezy guide to the mechanisms of human intelligence breaks us down, then builds us up, only to break us down again: We're ignorant, but that's okay, because accessible, actionable knowledge is everywhere-but our easy access to information makes us recklessly overconfident.
A GLOBAL BRAIN BANK
The human mind is an outstanding problem solver but a less impressive storage device. We can hold, according to some estimates, about l gigabyte of memory, maybe as much as 10. But our minds are not computers. They rely not entirely on memory and deliberation, as a machine must, but on pattern recognition and insight. Besides, there's just too much to know. Most of our knowledge instead resides outside of our heads-in our bodies, in the environment, and most crucially, in other people.
That's not a weakness, it's a strength. "You're seeing only a tiny bit of the world at a time, but you know the rest is there," the authors write. Our knowledge of how the world normally functions allows us to learn all we need to know about an environment by just looking around and allows us to draw correct conclusions about the space we're in without seeing it all at once. In other words, the world is part of your memory. Did you already forget the punch line to the Monty Python sketch? That's fine: You know it's right there at the top of the page, easy to access.
We have succeeded as a species because of how well communities of brains work together. Every significant project ever attempted-pyramid, cathedral, or skyscraper-would be inconceivable if it had to rely on a single mind. Evolutionary speaking, this is the social brain hypothesis. As social groups grew in size and complexity, we developed new cognitive capabilities to support our communities through specialization, distributed expertise, and division of cognitive labor. In short, we share intentionality, a trait easily observed in the group play of children and the global collaboration of scientific research.
What's true of a particle accelerator, a massively complex product of distributed expertise, also holds for our smallest groups: Spouses are more prone to forget details in areas of their partner's clear expertise-the right wine or how to file taxes--and vice versa. We can focus our memory on what we have to, or want to, secure that our partner has his or her territory equally well covered.
If we can't make use of other people's knowledge, we can't succeed. We can barely function. But if we can't recognize that most of our knowledge lives outside our brains, we face a different problem, and at least as much as it is about cognition, The Knowledge Illusion is about hubris.
To varying extents, we all live under the illusion of explanatory depth. "We fail to draw an accurate line between what is inside and outside our heads," the authors write. "So we frequently don't know what we don't know." The illusion is in some ways a byproduct of maturity. As preschoolers, we take an object in our hands and ask why and how it works until we're satisfied, or until our parents throw up their hands or distract us. Eventually, we stop asking. We come to tolerate our inability to understand our complex tools by deciding to stop recognizing it. And then we go further. "We think the knowledge we have about how things work sits inside our skulls when in fact we're drawing a lot of it from the environment and from other people."
Ignorance, the authors remind us, is our natural state and nothing to be ashamed of, as long as it's tempered with humility. When it is not, however, we can fall prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon in which those who perform the worst on a task overrate their skills the most. As has been shown in studies of doctors, workers, students, and perhaps most notably, drivers, those with the highest level of skill tend to underrate their abilities-they recognize how much they don't know and how much better they could perform. Those who perform worst, however, tend to lack a sense of what skills they're missing, and instead remain willfully ignorant of their potential. "When the only way to evaluate how much you know is through your own knowledge, you'll never get an honest assessment."

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a particular risk in the political arena. Leaders "have the responsibility to learn about their own ignorance and effectively take advantage of others' knowledge and skills," the authors suggest, and voters have an obligation as well: "A mature electorate is one that makes the effort to appreciate a leader who recognizes that the world is complex and hard to understand."
HOW FACTS CAN DEFEAT BELIEFS
It's not only knowledge that is spread across communities, it's beliefs and values as well-and they're not always fact-based. The flip side of collective intelligence is groupthink, when members of a group provide each other with support for a shared belief that may have no factual basis. The illusion of explanatory depth helps to explain how we can passionately hold strong opinions with little factual support. But discarding an incorrect belief agreed upon by one's community-say, about climate change-is a daunting cognitive challenge.
Research into the illusion offers a way out-not through debate but through humility-evoking doubt. Studies have found that the best way to shift others' opinions is to employ the same strategy that helps them understand that they don't really know how a toilet works: Ask them to explain it. When people are prompted to do so, they are forced to acknowledge their lack of knowledge. The illusion is broken, and after such encounters, people report less attachment to extreme opinions. Similarly, when climate-change skeptics are shown videos or articles about the science behind the process-the mechanisms, not the blame-their cognitive wall begins to crack. In the end, the authors report, "no one wants to be wrong."
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Drevitch, Gary. "Massively intelligent." Psychology Today, Mar.-Apr. 2017, p. 44+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483929623&it=r&asid=978da046c4d098e37ed0e9af8410f064. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A483929623

Sloman, Steven: THE KNOWLEDGE ILLUSION

(Jan. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Sloman, Steven THE KNOWLEDGE ILLUSION Riverhead (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 3, 14 ISBN: 978-0-399-18435-2
A tour of the many honeycombs of the hive mind, courtesy of cognitive scientists Sloman (Brown Univ.) and Fernbach (Univ. of Colorado).You know more than I do, and you know next to nothing yourself. That's not just a Socratic proposition, but also a finding of recent generations of neuroscientific researchers, who, as Cognition editor Sloman notes, are given to addressing a large question: "How is thinking possible?" One answer is that much of our thinking relies on the thinking of others--and, increasingly, on machine others. As the authors note, flying a plane is a collaboration among pilots, designers, engineers, flight controllers, and automated systems, the collective mastery or even understanding of all of which is beyond the capacity of all but a very few humans. One thought experiment the authors propose is to produce from your mind everything you can say about how zippers work, a sobering exercise that quickly reveals the superficiality of much of what we carry inside our heads. We think we know, and then we don't. Therein lies a small key to wisdom, and this leads to a larger purpose, which is that traditional assessments of intelligence and performance are off-point: what matters is what the individual mind contributes to the collectivity. If that sounds vaguely collectivist, so be it. All the same, the authors maintain, "intelligence is no longer a person's ability to reason and solve problems; it's how much the person contributes to a group's reasoning and problem-solving process." This contribution, they add, may not just lie in creativity, but also in doing the grunt work necessary to move a project along. After all, even with better, more effectively distributed thinking, "ignorance is inevitable." Some of the book seems self-evident, some seems to be mere padding, and little of it moves with the sparkling aha intelligence of Daniel Dennett. Still, it's sturdy enough, with interesting insights, especially for team building.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"Sloman, Steven: THE KNOWLEDGE ILLUSION." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477242249&it=r&asid=ce1a6e2c144950259e54207a2e912cf6. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A477242249

The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone

263.46 (Nov. 14, 2016): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone
Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach. Riverhead, $28 (304p) ISBN 978-0-399-18435-2
Sloman, a professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences, and Fernbach, a cognitive scientist and professor of marketing, attempt nothing less than a takedown of widely held beliefs about intelligence and knowledge, namely the role of an individual's brain as the main center for knowledge. Using a mixture of stories and science from an array of disciplines, the authors present a compelling and entertaining examination of the gap between knowledge one thinks one has and the amount of knowledge actually held in the brain, seeking to "explain how human thinking can be so shallow and so powerful at the same time." The book starts with revelatory scholarly insights into the relationship between knowledge and the brain, finding that humans "are largely unaware of how little we understand." Sloman and Fernbach then take the reader through numerous real-life applications of their findings, such as the implications for non-experts' understanding of science, politics, and personal finances. In an increasingly polarized culture where certainty reigns supreme, a book advocating intellectual humility and recognition of the limits of understanding feels both revolutionary and necessary. The fact that it's a fun and engaging page-turner is a bonus benefit for the reader. Agent: Christy Fletcher, Fletcher and Co. (Mar.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone." Publishers Weekly, 14 Nov. 2016, p. 41. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473459010&it=r&asid=d3ca437f8d95bd15ce1444aa3bde8a2a. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A473459010

Hughes, Mary Ann. "Sloman, Steven & Philip Fernbach. The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone." Library Journal, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 94+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA483702177&asid=da18f5304b6da8ba93a61bfbb02f902b. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017. "Mind meld; Cognitive science." The Economist, 8 Apr. 2017, p. 75(US). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA493932701&asid=2fac046563d9ec341c617d1fc45fa46c. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017. Drevitch, Gary. "Massively intelligent." Psychology Today, Mar.-Apr. 2017, p. 44+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA483929623&asid=978da046c4d098e37ed0e9af8410f064. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017. "Sloman, Steven: THE KNOWLEDGE ILLUSION." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA477242249&asid=ce1a6e2c144950259e54207a2e912cf6. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017. "The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone." Publishers Weekly, 14 Nov. 2016, p. 41. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA473459010&asid=d3ca437f8d95bd15ce1444aa3bde8a2a. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.

• New York Times Book Review
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/books/review/knowledge-illusion-steven-sloman-philip-fernbach.html
  Word count: 1345

  People Have Limited Knowledge. What’s the Remedy? Nobody Knows
  By YUVAL HARARIAPRIL 18, 2017
  Continue reading the main story
  Share This Page
  Share
  Tweet
  Pin
  Email
  More
  Save
  Photo

  Credit
  Janet Hansen
  THE KNOWLEDGE ILLUSION
  Why We Never Think Alone
  By Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach
  Illustrated. 296 pp. Riverhead Books. $28.
  In “The Knowledge Illusion,” the cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach hammer another nail into the coffin of the rational individual. From the 17th century to the 20th century, Western thought depicted individual human beings as independent rational agents, and consequently made these mythical creatures the basis of modern society. Democracy is founded on the idea that the voter knows best, free market capitalism believes the customer is always right, and modern education tries to teach students to think for themselves.
  Over the last few decades, the ideal of the rational individual has been attacked from all sides. Postcolonial and feminist thinkers challenged it as a chauvinistic Western fantasy, glorifying the autonomy and power of white men. Behavioral economists and evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristic shortcuts rather than rational analysis, and that while our emotions and heuristics were perhaps suitable for dealing with the African savanna in the Stone Age, they are woefully inadequate for dealing with the urban jungle of the silicon age.
  Sloman and Fernbach take this argument further, positing that not just rationality but the very idea of individual thinking is a myth. Humans rarely think for themselves. Rather, we think in groups. Just as it takes a tribe to raise a child, it also takes a tribe to invent a tool, solve a conflict or cure a disease. No individual knows everything it takes to build a cathedral, an atom bomb or an aircraft. What gave Homo sapiens an edge over all other animals and turned us into the masters of the planet was not our individual rationality, but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups.
  Continue reading the main story

  Smarter Living
  Stories to help you understand the world – and make the most of it.

  Dorm Essentials You Shouldn’t Forget (and Some You Should Skip)
  AUG 10
  What to Say When People Ask Why You Aren’t Having Children
  AUG 8
  Books About Curious Minds, Recommended for the Curious Minded
  AUG 8
  It’s Back to School Season. Here’s How to Prepare.
  AUG 2
  How Tech Can Ease Your Summer Travel
  AUG 2
  See More »
  ADVERTISEMENT
  Continue reading the main story

  As Sloman and Fernbach demonstrate in some of the most interesting and unsettling parts of the book, individual humans know embarrassingly little about the world, and as history progressed, they came to know less and less. A hunter-gatherer in the Stone Age knew how to produce her own clothes, how to start a fire from scratch, how to hunt rabbits and how to escape lions. We today think we know far more, but as individuals we actually know far less. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all our needs. In one humbling experiment, people were asked to evaluate how well they understood how a zipper works. Most people confidently replied that they understood it very well — after all, they use zippers all the time. They were then asked to explain how a zipper works, describing in as much detail as possible all the steps involved in the zipper’s operation. Most had no idea. This is the knowledge illusion. We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.
  Photo

  This is not necessarily bad, though. Our reliance on groupthink has made us masters of the world, and the knowledge illusion enables us to go through life without being caught in an impossible effort to understand everything ourselves. From an evolutionary perspective, trusting in the knowledge of others has worked extremely well for humans.
  Yet like many other human traits that made sense in past ages but cause trouble in the modern age, the knowledge illusion has its downside. The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realize just how ignorant they are of what’s going on. Consequently some who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless conduct fierce debates about climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate them on a map. People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged.
  According to Sloman (a professor at Brown and editor of the journal Cognition) and Fernbach (a professor at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business), providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Scientists hope to dispel antiscience prejudices by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues like Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports. Such hopes are grounded in a misunderstanding of how humans actually think. Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we cling to these views because of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. If you think that you can convince Donald Trump of the truth of global warming by presenting him with the relevant facts — think again.
  Indeed, scientists who believe that facts can change public opinion may themselves be the victims of scientific groupthink. The scientific community believes in the efficacy of facts, hence those loyal to that community continue to believe they can win public debates by marshaling the right facts, despite much empirical evidence to the contrary. Similarly, the traditional belief in individual rationality may itself be the product of groupthink rather than of empirical evidence. In one of the climactic moments of Monty Python’s “Life of Brian,” a huge crowd of starry-eyed followers mistakes Brian for the Messiah. Caught in a corner, Brian tells his disciples: “You don’t need to follow me, you don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You’re all individuals!” The enthusiastic crowd then chants in unison: “Yes! We’re all individuals!” Monty Python was parodying the counterculture orthodoxy of the 1960s, but the point may be true of the belief in rational individualism in other ages too.
  In the coming decades, the world will probably become far more complex than it is today. Individual humans will consequently know even less about the technological gadgets, the economic currents and the political dynamics that shape the world. How could we then vest authority in voters and customers who are so ignorant and susceptible to manipulation? If Sloman and Fernbach are correct, providing future voters and customers with more and better facts would hardly solve the problem. So what’s the alternative? Sloman and Fernbach don’t have a solution. They suggest a few remedies like offering people simple rules of thumb (“Save 15 percent of your income,” say), educating people on a just-in-time basis (teaching them how to handle unemployment immediately when they are laid off) and encouraging people to be more realistic about their ignorance. This will hardly be enough, of course. True to their own advice, Sloman and Fernbach are well aware of the limits of their own understanding, and they know they don’t know the answer. In all likelihood, nobody knows.
  Yuval Harari is the author of “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus.”

Word Count