Cass R. Sunstein Quotes

Emotions can get in the way of truth-seeking. People do not process information in a neutral way.

...when like-minded people get together, they often end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk to one another.

As Joseph Schumpeter remarked, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time, but you can fool enough of the people for long enough to do irreversible damage.

do not be misled by expert bravado or by an expert’s own sense of how he or she is doing. Evidence is a much better guide than an impressive self-presentation.

Star Wars and Star Trek are good in different ways, and in fairness, you can’t really rank them. But Star Wars is better. “YOUR

Asked to resolve problems in a language that is not their own, people are less likely to depart from standard accounts of rationality.

[d]espotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvements, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.

Economists suggest that we should assess the value of decisions in terms of two considerations: the costs of decisions and the costs of errors.

Janis believed that groups are especially likely to suffer from groupthink if they are cohesive, have highly directive leadership, and are insulated from experts.

If government is to respect people's autonomy, or to treat them with dignity, it should not deprive them of freedom. It should treat them as adults, rather than children or infants.

We can believe in hierarchy. We can believe the universe was made just for us. Hierarchy and a major sense of entitlement are not insurmountable problems. The problem occurs when we treat those whom we believe lie beneath us as slaves. Religion once sustained human slavery. It was wrong then. When it blindly sanctions the slavery of every nonhuman animal, it is wrong now.

it can be masked with a veneer of legality, it can be cloaked with plausible deniability. It is always possible to justify each incremental step.

It might also count as an insult to dignity, and a form of infantilization, if the government constantly reminds people of things that they already know.

Our favorite messengers are sometimes wrong and our least favorite messengers are sometimes right.

They suggest that with respect to facts, partisan differences are much less sharp than they seem—and that political polarization is often an artifact of the survey setting.

The multiple failures of top-down design, and the omnipresence of unintended consequences, can be attributed in large part, to the absence of relevant information.

People are moderately more likely to favor approaches that involve reflection and deliberation.

People are more likely to object to nudges that appeal to unconscious or subconscious processes.

In the United States both plates and portions have increased dramatically over time. A really good nudge would be to make them smaller.

If public opinion cannot express itself through political associations, newspapers, and electoral politics, it will be channeled into mob violence

If we understand “rights” to be legal protection against harm, then many animals already do have rights, and the idea of animal rights is not terribly controversial.

The idea of “great and dangerous offenses” is an excellent shorthand for the views of the ratifiers—at least if we understand such offenses as including egregious abuses or misuses of official authority.

How about 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7? Think about it for a minute. That approach has the advantage of giving you “I am your father,” and of starting with the mysteries of the two best, while treating the prequels as kind of a flashback (as you’re also focused on the cliffhanger ending of 5). Then you get to wrap everything up with the real finale, and the best, before the third trilogy starts. Not a bad idea at all. A

Or consider the fact that after people buy a new car, they often love to read advertisements that speak enthusiastically about the same car that they have just obtained. Those advertisements tend to be comforting because they confirm the wisdom of the decision to purchase that particular car. If you are a member of a particular political party or have strong convictions, you might want support, reinforcement, and ammunition, not criticism.

By itself, partyism is not the most serious threat to democratic self-government. But if it decreases government’s ability to solve serious problems, then it has concrete and potentially catastrophic consequences for people’s lives. I

Worst of all, we might miss the real opportunities for a thoughtful, other-regarding reconciliation of two critical parts of our human nature: the desire to liberate and enable the individual, and the impetus to protect and serve the collective.

We are blind to the fact that what we do to them deprives them of their rights; we do not want to see this because we profit from it, and so we make use of what are really morally irrelevant differences between them and ourselves to justify the difference in treatment.

in the event of an “authoritarian revolution,” authoritarians may seek massive social change in pursuit of greater oneness and sameness, willingly overturning established institutions and practices that their (psychologically) conservative peers would be drawn to defend and preserve.

You can become radicalized in the sense that you come to believe, firmly, a position that is within the political mainstream—for example, that your preferred political candidate is not just the best but immeasurably better than the alternatives, and that any other choice would be catastrophic.

In the long term, Trump, if successful, may be able to replace disloyal appointees with loyal appointees, and may be able to attract loyalists to civil service positions. In the short term, he can threaten to undermine agencies that fail to do his bidding or in any other way pose a threat to his power.

In contrast to status quo conservatism, authoritarianism is primarily driven not by aversion to change (difference over time) but by aversion to complexity (difference across space). In a nutshell, authoritarians are “simple-minded avoiders of complexity more than closed-minded avoiders of change” (Stenner 2009b: 193).

The American constitutional order is meant to create a deliberative democracy, in which debate and discussion accompany accountability. This is not merely a system of majority rule, through which majorities get to do as they like simply because they are majorities. Reason-giving is central, and a deliberative democracy gives reasons.

Padmé insists: “There’s always a choice.” Does Anakin hear the echo of her voice decades later, when he decides to save their son from the Emperor? I like to think so. “YOU GET MANY OPPORTUNITIES TO KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN” Here’s Leia, speaking of Han’s apparent desertion of the rebellion in A New Hope: “A man must follow his own path. No one can choose it for him.” Here’s Obi-Wan to Luke, again in A New Hope: “Then you must do what you think is right, of course.” Here are Lucas’s own words: “Life sends you down funny paths. And you get many opportunities to keep your eyes open.” He was talking about his own life, but he might as well have been talking about Star Wars and the characters who populate it.

There is another problem. Echo chambers can lead people to believe in falsehoods, and it may be difficult or impossible to correct them. Falsehoods take a toll. One illustration is the belief that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. As falsehoods go, this one is not the most damaging, but it both reflected and contributed to a politics of suspicion, distrust, and sometimes hatred. A

This conception of representation appears throughout The Federalist Papers. No. 57 urges that: “The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.

Lawrence Kasdan has this to say about Star Wars: “Force Awakens, New Hope, Empire—these are movies about fulfilling what is inside you. That’s a story that everybody can relate to. Even when you get to be my age, you’re still trying to figure that out. It’s amazing but it’s true. What am I, what am I about, have I fulfilled my potential, and, if not, is there still time? That’s what the Star Wars saga is about.

As the lives of their characters develop, they end up on paths that writers could not possibly have foreseen—and hence give the impression of agency, even to their authors. William Blake wrote of his works “tho I call them Mine I know they are not Mine,” and characterized his process of writing as a kind of dictation, “without Premeditation or even against my Will.” Musicians sometimes speak in exactly the same way.

Do musical preferences predict political inclinations? Not long ago, an official with Pandora said that its predictions about those inclinations, based on zip code as well as musical choices, are between 75 and 80 percent accurate. And with that level of accuracy, it developed an advertising service “that would enable candidates and political organizations to target the majority of its 73 million active monthly Pandora listeners based on its sense of their political leanings.

Without shared experiences, a heterogeneous society will have a much more difficult time addressing social problems. People may even find it hard to understand one another. Common experiences, emphatically including the common experiences made possible by social media, provide a form of social glue. A national holiday is a shared experience. So is a major sports event (the Olympics or the World Cup), or a movie that transcends individual and group differences (Star Wars is a candidate). So

A choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions. [T]here are many parallels between choice architecture and more traditional forms of architecture. A crucial parallel is that there is no such thing as a “neutral” design. [A]s good architects know, seemingly arbitrary decisions, such as where to locate the bathrooms, will have subtle influences on how the people who use the building interact. [S]mall and apparently insignificant details can have major impacts on people’s behavior. [I]n many cases, the power of these small details comes from focusing the attention of users in a particular direction. Good architects realize that although they can’t build the perfect building, they can make some design choices that will have beneficial effects. And just as a building architect must eventually build some particular building, a choice architect must [for example] choose a particular arrangement of food options at lunch, and by so doing she can influence what people eat. She can nudge.

A lot of people disparage the Star Wars prequels, and understandably so; they’re not nearly as good as the original trilogy. But in their own way, they’re not just beautiful; they’re also awfully clever. Here’s the best part: all of the choices in the first trilogy are precisely mirrored in the prequels. The two trilogies are about freedom of choice under nearly identical conditions. Lucas was entirely aware of this: “Luke is faced with the same issues and practically the same scenes that Anakin is faced with. Anakin says yes and Luke says no.

More recently, Lucas described a visit in Europe, after the release of Revenge of the Sith, “with a dozen reporters, and the Russian correspondents all thought the film was about Russian politics, and the Americans all thought it was about Bush. And I said, ‘Well, it’s really based on Rome. And on the French Revolution and Bonaparte.’” The prequels focus on the rise of tyranny and the collapse of democracies. They explore the kinds of machinations that allow dictators to come to power, and they show how republics fall prey to them. There’s a stylized account of the loss of freedom, which Padmé nicely captures: “So this is how liberty dies . . . with thunderous applause.

What really matters is that in the Star Wars series, as in many works of literature, “I am your father” moments and their accompanying shivers are defining. They involve pivotal transitions and reversals of course, which nonetheless maintain (enough) continuity with the previous story, which now changes and gets more interesting. Vader’s fatherhood also created a significant challenge for Lucas, because it meant that viewers had to reassess past scenes, sometimes in fundamental ways. If the reassessment produced utter incredulity in the audience—not an “OMG” but a “WTF?”—the “I am your father” moment would not work. In fact it would have backfired, ruining the whole series.

Luke begins as that innocent farm boy, with no particular religious convictions. He is isolated and rootless—an excellent target for extremists. Sure enough, he embarks on what an online commentator describes as a “dark journey into religious fundamentalism and extremism.” A disaffected and somewhat lost young man, in search of something, he comes across Obi-Wan Kenobi, plainly a religious fanatic, who follows self-evidently extremist ideas about the Force. “Within moments of meeting Luke, Obi-Wan tells Luke he must abandon his family and join him, going so far as telling a shocking lie that the Empire killed Luke’s father, hoping to inspire Luke to a life of jihad.” Obi-Wan

Somewhat more broadly, I will suggest that animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law.

As usual, the place to start is with people’s actual goals and intentions. If people make explicit promises to one another, the law should generally enforce their promises. ========== Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Thaler, Richard H.;Sunstein, Cass R.) - Your

Private relationships, intimate and otherwise, might be structured in many different ways, and the simple dichotomy between “single” and “married” does not do justice to what people might choose. ========== Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Thaler, Richard H.;Sunstein, Cass R.)

PM The upshot is that where the law is unclear, long and intense disputes are likely. Both sides would benefit if they could be nudged toward a smaller range of expected outcomes, so that their expectations will have some overlap. ========== Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Thaler, Richard H.;Sunstein, Cass R.)

Brandeis can be taken to have offered a conception of the social role of the idealized citizen. For such a citizen, active engagement in politics, at least some of the time, is a responsibility, not just an entitlement. If citizens are “inert,” freedom itself is at risk. If

Partyism certainly isn’t as horrible as racism; no one is enslaved or turned into a lower caste. But according to some measures, partyism now exceeds racism. In

In 1960, just 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said that they would feel “displeased” if their child married outside their political party.5 By 2010, those numbers had reached 49 and 33 percent, respectively—far higher than the percentage of people who would be “displeased” if their child married someone with a different skin color.

Any heterogeneous society faces a risk of fragmentation. This

In political, moral, and legal theory, many of the largest debates pit consequentialists against deontologists. Recall that consequentialists believe that the rightness of actions turns on their consequences, which are to be measured, aggregated, and ranked. (Utilitarianism is a species of consequentialism.) By contrast, deontologists believe that some actions are wrong even if they have good consequences. Many deontologists think that it is wrong to torture people or to kill them even if the consequences of doing so would be good. Many deontologists also think that you should not throw someone in the way of a speeding train even if that action would save lives on balance; that you should not torture someone even if doing so would produce information that would save lives; that slavery is a moral wrong regardless of the outcome of any utilitarian calculus; that the protection of free speech does not depend on any such calculus; that the strongest arguments for and against capital punishment turn on what is right, independent of the consequences of capital punishment.

The disagreements between deontologists and consequentialists bear directly on many issues in law and policy. Consequentialists believe that constitutional rights, including the right to free speech, must be defended and interpreted by reference to the consequences; deontologists disagree. Consequentialists are favorably disposed to cost-benefit analysis in regulatory policy, but that form of analysis has been vigorously challenged on broadly deontological grounds. Consequentialists favor theories of punishment that are based on deterrence, and they firmly reject retributivism, which some deontologists endorse.

But it is true that in its usual forms, consequentialism seems to conflict with some of our deepest intuitions, certainly in new or unfamiliar situations.2 For example, human beings appear to be intuitive retributivists; they want wrongdoers to suffer. With respect to punishment, efforts to encourage people to think in consequentialist terms do not fare at all well.3

It is important to acknowledge, however, that, in practice, people’s judgments about the authority of the executive are greatly and even decisively affected by their approval or disapproval of the incumbent president. Under a Republican president, Democrats do not approve of the idea of a discretion-wielding chief executive, enabled by deferential courts. Under a Democratic president, Republicans tend to have, and even to voice, the same cautions and concerns.

In 1960, just 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said that they would feel “displeased” if their son or daughter married outside their political party.8 By 2010, those numbers had reached 49 percent and 33 percent.9 Interestingly, comparable increases cannot be found in the relevant period in the United Kingdom.10

People are not, of course, perfectly rational. No reader of Shakespeare, Dickens, or Joyce, or observer of daily life, is unaware of this point.

To understand why sludge matters, let’s begin with the assumption that people are fully rational and that in deciding whether to wade through sludge, they make some calculation about costs and benefits. Even if the benefits of that wading are high, the costs might prove overwhelming.

Can subliminal advertising be seen as a form of libertarian paternalism? After all, it steers people’s choices, but it does not make their decisions for them. So do we embrace subliminal advertising—so long as it is in the interest of desirable ends? [C]ompare subliminal advertising to something just as cunning. If you want people to lose weight, one effective strategy is to put mirrors in the cafeteria. When people see themselves in the mirror, they may eat less if they are chubby. Is this okay? And if mirrors are acceptable, what about mirrors that are intentionally unflattering? Are such mirrors an acceptable strategy in the cafeteria? If so, what should we think about flattering mirrors in a fast food restaurant?

Consider the following fact. Sweden accounts for approximately 1 percent of the world economy. A rational investor in the United States or Japan would invest about 1 percent of his assets in Swedish stocks. Can it make sense for Swedish investors to invest 48 times more? No. [T]his reflects the well-known tendency of investors to buy stocks from their home country, something that economists refer to as the home bias.

It seems reasonable to say that people make good choices in contexts in which they have experience, god information, and prompt feedback - say, choosing among ice cream flavors. People know whether they like chocolate, vanilla, coffee, licorice, or something else. They do less well in contexts in which they are inexperienced and poorly informed, and in which feedback is slow or infrequent - say, in choosing between fruit and ice cream (where the long-term effects are slow and feedback is poor) or in choosing among medical treatments or investment options. If you are given fifty prescription drug plans, with multiple and varying features, you might benefit from a little help. So long as people are not choosing perfectly, some changes in the choice architecture could make their lives go better (as judged by their own preferences, not those of some bureaucrat).

There is overwhelming evidence that obesity increases risks of heart disease and diabetes, frequently leading to premature death. It would be quite fantastic to suggest that everyone is choosing the right diet, or a diet that is preferable to what might be produced with a few nudges. Of course, sensible people care about the taste of food, not simply about health, and eating is a source of pleasure in and of itself. We do not claim that everyone who is overweight is necessarily failing to act rationally, but we do reject the claim that all or almost all Americans are choosing their diet optimally.

Social scientists emphasize that people use the “availability heuristic,” which means that we assess risks by asking whether a bad (or good) event is cognitively “available.” It

The first paragraph of The Federalist, No. 1 offers the following contrast: “It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

Burke writes: We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers… . The science of government being therefore so practical in itself, and intended for such practical purposes, a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite caution than any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree, for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again, without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes. Thus

There is widespread support for nudges that are taken to have legitimate ends and to be consistent with the interests and the values of most choosers.

Covertly influencing decision processes such as that the resulting decision is aligned with higher-order desires may actually enhance autonomy.

If manipulation really does increase welfare, then it would seem to be justified and even mandatory on ethical grounds.

We can even see the legal institution of marriage as a precommitment strategy, not unlike that of Ulysses in approaching the Sirens, in which people knowingly choose a legal status that will protect them against their own errors. ========== Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Thaler, Richard H.;Sunstein, Cass R.)

We can see here why many groups fall prey to what is known as “collective conservatism”: the tendency of groups to stick to established patterns even as new needs arise. Once a practice (like wearing ties) has become established, it is likely to be perpetuated, even if there is no particular basis for it.

planning fallacy.

Centuries later, John Rawls wrote of the same possibility: “The benefits from discussion lie in the fact that even representative legislators are limited in knowledge and the ability to reason. No one of them knows everything the others know, or can make all the same inferences that they can draw in concert. Discussion is a way of combining information and enlarging the range of arguments.

瓦特．夸特羅喬奇（Walter Quattrociocchi）、安東尼奧．史卡拉（Antonio Scala）與凱斯．桑斯坦（Cass R. Sunstein）最近合著的文章〈臉書同溫層〉（Echo Chambers on Facebook）提出某些很強的論據，證明這個問題是真實存在且棘手的。

The Empire Strikes Back (grade: A+) A New Hope (grade: A+) Return of the Jedi (grade: A) Rogue One (grade: A) Revenge of the Sith (grade: A-) The Force Awakens (grade: A-) The Last Jedi (grade: B+) Attack of the Clones (grade: B+) The Phantom Menace (grade: B) Solo (grade: C)

With this lesson in mind, Mullainathan and Shafir insist that certain characteristics that we attribute to individual personality (lack of motivation, inability to focus) may actually be a problem of limited bandwidth. The problem is scarcity, not the person.

Small and apparently insignificant details can have major impacts on people's behavior. A good rule of thumb is to assume that "everything matters.

Libertarian paternalists want to make it easy for people to go their own way; they do not want to burden those who want to exercise their freedom. The paternalistic aspect lies in the claim that it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better.

My own evidence attests to the importance of both hedonic and instrumental value.

Strikingly, 71 percent want to know if there is life on other planets. Perhaps surprisingly, only a bare majority (53 percent) want to know if heaven really exists. Those who did not want to know probably fell within various categories: (1) those who are sure that heaven does exist, so the information would be worthless; (2) those who are sure that heaven does not exist, so the information would be worthless; (3) those who think that they will not get into heaven, so learning of its existence could only make them sad or upset; or (4) those who think that it is best to have a degree of uncertainty. A smaller number (44 percent) want to know if hell exists – which is probably testimony to the fact that if hell exists, a lot of people think that they will be in big trouble.

Sometimes ordinary people and public institutions rely not on a rule but instead on a presumption, which can be rebutted

Rules are often contrasted with standards.5 A ban on “excessive” speed on the highway is a standard; so is a requirement that pilots of airplanes be “competent,” or that student behavior in the classroom be “reasonable.” These might be compared with rules specifying a 55-mph speed limit, or a ban on pilots who are over the age of seventy, or a requirement that students sit in assigned seats.

A forgetful person might adopt a routine of locking his door every time he leaves his office, even though sometimes he knows he will return in a few minutes; a commuter might adopt a particular route and follow it every day, even though on some days another route would be better; an employee might arrive at the office by a specified time every morning, even though he does not always need to be in that early.

Second-order strategies should be chosen by attempting to minimize the sum of the costs of making decisions and the costs of error, where the costs of making decisions are the costs of coming to closure on some action or set of actions, and where the costs of error are assessed by examining the number, the magnitude, and the kinds of mistakes.

Picking can even be said to operate as a kind of delegation, where the object of the delegation is “fate,” and the agent loses the sense of responsibility that might accompany an all-things-considered judgment.

Watching television, playing tennis, or going out to dinner with friends might be pleasurable, whether or not any of those activities is meaningful. Helping others, doing one’s job well, or parenting might be meaningful, whether or not any of them is pleasant.

We might think that our lives are full of pleasure without being full of meaning; we might think that our lives are full of meaning without being full of pleasure. Of course, the idea of eudaimonia might be taken to include both pleasure and meaning.

We shall see, for example, that a second-order decision in favor of firm rules (a form of High-Low) is appropriate when an agent faces a large number of decisions with similar features and when advance planning is especially important; in such cases, the crudeness of rules might be tolerated because of their overall advantages.

Restaurants and movie theaters are well aware of this phenomenon. A movie theater might offer Option A, which is regular popcorn, and also Option B, which is large popcorn. Knowing that people will choose Option A, it might introduce Option C, which is jumbo popcorn. Maybe few people will choose Option C, but its existence leads more people to choose Option B.

People are intuitive retributivists.37 They do not naturally think in terms of optimal deterrence, and they will be reluctant to do so even if they are asked.

The good news–bad news effect can be seen as a reflection of a form of motivated reasoning known as “desirability bias”:8 People are more likely to shift their beliefs in a direction that pleases them or that makes them feel better.

As we have seen, delegations may require little advance thinking, at least on the substance of the issues to be decided; the burdens of decision will eventually be faced by the object of the delegation (who may be one’s future self).

About 57 percent would like to know whether their partner or spouse ever cheats on them. Only 42 percent would like to know what their friends and family members really think about them!

To see why noise can be a problem, return to the medical context. Suppose that doctors order a large number of tests in the morning, but that in the afternoon, they ask patients to go home and take aspirin. Or suppose that when doctors are in a good mood, they make very different decisions from those they make when they are grumpy. If so, doctors might not show a systemic bias of any kind. But they will be noisy, and the noise will be produce plenty of mistaken decisions.

Indeed, many people want to retain agency even if they know that if they delegated the decision to another (including an algorithm), they would end up with better outcomes.

Some evidence identifies a particular source of algorithm aversion: People are far more willing to forgive mistakes by human beings than they are willing to forgive mistakes by algorithms.

People are especially averse to algorithmic forecasters after seeing them err, even if they do better than human forecasters.27

There is another factor. People have been found not to trust algorithms, and not to want to use them, in part because they do not know how they work.

But research finds that people are more likely to trust algorithms, and to be willing to rely on them, if they are given a simple account of why they work.

The goods should be popular, but not too popular. For demi-solidarity goods, the number of users matters and may be crucial to choice. But value neither increases nor decreases continuously as a function of that number.