1x2 — Steven Sloman: people, knowledge and collaboration
When thinking about design, and through design, it is essential to face our relationship with knowledge and information. In the design discipline — as in most of the general design actions, dozens of conceptual dynamics are often difficult to keep track of. In other words, the relationship that we experience between our knowledge, or what we think is ours, and reality is such a self-referential union that often make us tend to separate things between subject and object.
However, without any pretence of drawing up a new theory of knowledge, nor of addressing the question of metaphysical realism, this precious interview has the pleasure of going through these questions from a psychological and cognitive point of view thanks to the important availability of Steven Sloman, who has published in 2017: The Knowledge Illusion. Why we never think alone co-written with Philip Fernbach. Therefore this conversation aims to investigate some crucial aspects of our thought mechanisms, opening up to touchpoints with design practice.
Steven Sloman. is a cognitive scientist and an academic author. He has been professor at Brown University since 1992, and he is engaged with the complex field of linguistic, behavioral and psychological sciences. As for the first conversation, his answers were recorded and subsequently summarized by myself. Enjoy the talk!
Dear professor Sloman, let’s start from the core of your great research: our way of thinking with-and-about knowledge. Why do we, as human beings, suffer from the illusion of explanatory depth? And thus how do we fixate our beliefs?
“I think the reason that we suffer from the illusion of explanatory depth, that we think we understand how things work better than we do, is because we confuse others knowledge with our own. And the reason we do that is because we are made to operate in groups. So we should think about cognition as a collective entity: such that I know a bit, I make my little narrow contribution,
but other people know things too and I use the knowledge that others have. So the critical question in that is, why don’t I know what I know, so that I can distinguish what I know from what others know. And I think the answer to that, is because it doesn’t always serve a purpose. As long as you can access the information, as long as you can access knowledge, it doesn’t really matter
where it is sitting. In your brain, in somebody else’s brain, or in the physical world. Now, if you think about how much it would take to keep track of what you know and what everyone knows, it would be really hard to know everything. I mean, sometimes there are exceptions, because it is important if you are writing an exam, or if you are going off into the desert to build something, you better understand what you do before you go. And we fixate our beliefs mostly through other people. So wherever there is a complexity that someone can think about it, “how turning the key starts the car”, there’s really no need to understand that deeply because other people have designed it. And so hard beliefs, that turning the key will start the car, are grounded in what other people know. And that is sufficient.”
So, starting from that “community” of knowledge, what is the place in it for our rationality? Do we achieve it and use it for other purposes than to construct a sense of things and reality?
“Firstly, we have to get clear what we mean by rationality. I use the term rationality, as cognitive scientist, in a very specific way. When I say a behavior is rational, first of all, what I just talk about is actions or behaviors as being rational. And what I mean by “a behavior or an action is rational”, is that it will help us to accomplish our own goals. Therefore, what cognitive sciences can help to highlight is not to associate rationality only with thought, rather you should consider action. In the case of thought, the word I would use to explain the mechanism by which we give meaning to reality, is deliberation. That is important to distinguish from rationality, because we want our behaviors to be rational, and it doesn’t really matter if they are really deliberative or not. Deliberation is just the method to try to arrive at rational actions. And its beauty, is that deliberation refers both to the conscious thought process going on in the head, and to conversation. It refers to a group of people collaborating. Talking about things. So, I think it is really important because people change things through the process of deliberating with others. Now, considering deductive reasoning, or the inductive and abductive ones, explanation, all of these things that involve symbol manipulation, we can do them both inside our heads, but we also can do that with other people. And what is crucial is that when we are doing in our heads often — in fact always, we need some external device to help us with the deliberation. And language is one of those devices. Paper and drawings, and computers and calculators, those are all helpful devices. But language is probably the most helpful. Because it means that we can take advantage of other people’s thought processes in order to deliberate together.”
Now, moving on design, as the practice that gives shape to the world, and people cognition, what are according to you the key concepts about that relationship? What should we consider when designing artefacts people will actually interact with?
“Well, it seems to me that a first important concept is to minimize the need to think. To minimize the deliberation. So if you think about what people can do, people are good at picking out the invariance in the world. When we are navigating a certain pattern that tells us to “go straight”, or to turn, or to go through a doorway, we are really good at picking out those patterns because. we understand really well what invariance in the world is. And I think this is true to a higher level, when we are thinking if something is right or wrong. Then people are good, at figuring out whether something violates their basic. values or doesn’t violate their basic values. But what we are not good at, is doing a lot of calculation and deliberation. So it seems to me, that the problem with so much “designed”, is that the designer thinks to design for himself and not for someone else. And the big problem is that the designer understands how the designed thing works because he is designing it, but the other person who is going to use it, has no idea how it works. And somehow. you have to build, into the thing you are designing, the answer; the set of options that the user needs. For instance, I think the iPhone is an amazing design, and it is so successful, because it makes so few assumptions the user needs to understand. It just says: “you touch where you want!” Otherwise, if you put too much instruction into your design, people won’t read it. Often, if they get confused from details, they ask somebody else for help. And in fact, people don’t even try things unless other people are recommended them. So, on one hand, people are good at finding. invariance, that is why they complete videogames so well, on the other one, people are good at making use of other people. So the whole process of choosing what to use, and using it, is a collaborative process.”
Professor Sloman let’s try an exercise. Thinking ideally for a moment, what would be the perfect world for the kind of thought we have developed till. today? Are you envisioning any big change in our thought-reality relationship?
“This is an interesting question, because the biggest problem I think we are encountering — because of the way we think — is deception. Politicians are trying to deceive us, marketers are trying to deceive us. Our friends are often trying to deceive us. All these people make themself much more attractive than they really are. Our machinery is trying to deceive us, by appearing more effective than it really is. So I think the biggest problem with the world is that we are all constantly marketing ourselves. And marketing our ideas. And because our sense of understanding things depends on the sense of understanding of the people surrounding us, we can get very confused about what we understand and what we don’t, and what other people understand. We have politicians who are claiming to understand incredibly complex things, like economies or climate change. They express extreme confidence in their knowledge, and so people trust them and this leads to disasters. Regarding the future, and considering also the massive use of technologies we are using today, it seems to me really hard to make any prediction. People have been making predictions for a long time, and they seem to be always wrong. For instance, technology is advancing so fast and it is having so many unexpected consequences that I really don’t know what is going to happen. We probably need to develop cultural norms to deal with that, which says to prove that things will do what they are designed for. A lot of people are now committed to producing services that help other people to not believe things unless they are evidence-based, and that is great because it is what we need. But the problem that remains to face is that hard beliefs are necessarily based on testimony. And so, we can’t see all the evidence so directly. I can’t see what is going on in Syria, I need to believe what other people are telling me about that. It is going to take a huge collective effort to figure out how to separate. truth from fiction. And I hope that it will happen, but today I see more people taking advantage of others.”
Finally, creativity. As we live and think, we are constantly going up and down through different degrees — higher and lower, of abstraction. According to your studies, how has creativity evolved?
“I would avoid talking about creativity, that is too hard! But, what I think is. important to remember when you are talking about creativity, is that something is creative not in virtue of a cognitive process; something is creative because it happens to be a solution to a problem that is in the world. So the world is just as important for creativity as the mind. And the question now is, what does the mind do, what does deliberation do? What does the collective intelligence do? I think the only thing it can really do is provide effective frames to understand things by. For instance, thinking again about deliberation, I think the problem that could rise up between people who are thinking together, is the way we have different conceptual frames. And each frame is associated with the vocabulary, and generates it. So when I am trying to talk to people from different fields, often it is difficult because they are just assuming all of their knowledge, they are assuming their way analyzing the world, that I just don’t have. I don’t have the frame that they have. So what is important to do in any effective deliberation, in any effective collaboration, is to find a common frame that makes sense to everyone! And probably, the hardest challenge for creativity, is that the common frame that people find could become a problem because they get stuck in that frame. And real creativity requires instead having all the possible frames, to find every possible solution. So it seems to me that the problem with creativity is, on one hand, finding a way to communicate with other people while, at the same time, retaining flexibility in the way you are thinking about things. So they can see things in new different ways. That is the fine line you have to walk!”
