Cass Sunstein Quotes

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

To become an extremist, hang around with people you agree with.

...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.

Luckily, scientists have uncovered a few secrets to help make the process of creating habits easier. In their bestselling book Nudge, the economist Richard Thaler and the law professor Cass Sunstein show how to influence other people’s behavior through carefully designed choices, or what they called “choice architecture.” You

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.

In a 2008 wedding toast to Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power, Leon Wieseltier put it about as well as possible: Brides and grooms are people who have discovered, by means of love, the local nature of happiness. Love is a revolution in scale, a revision of magnitudes; it is private and it is particular; its object is the specificity of this man and that woman, the distinctness of this spirit and that flesh. Love prefers deep to wide, and here to there; the grasp to the reach…. Love is, or should be, indifferent to history, immune to it—a soft and sturdy haven from it: when the day is done, and the lights are out, and there is only this other heart, this other mind, this other face, to assist in repelling one’s demons or in greeting one’s angels, it does not matter who the president is. When one consents to marry, one consents to be truly known, which is an ominous prospect; and so one bets on love to correct for the ordinariness of the impression, and to call forth the forgiveness that is invariably required by an accurate perception of oneself. Marriages are exposures. We may be heroes to our spouses but we may not be idols.

[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.

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

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

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.

Do people know which risks lead to many deaths and which risks lead to few?” the legal scholar Cass Sunstein asks. “They do not. In fact, they make huge blunders.” Sunstein draws this observation from the work of Paul Slovic, author of The Perception of Risk. In a study that invited people to compare various causes of death, Slovic found that people tended to believe that accidents cause more deaths than disease and that homicide causes more deaths than suicide, when the opposite is true in both cases. In another study, people significantly overestimated the fatality rates of highly publicized or dramatic dangers like cancer or tornadoes. One could interpret this, as Sunstein does, to mean that most people are just wrong about risk. But risk perception may not be about quantifiable risk so much as it is about immeasurable fear. Our fears are informed by history and economics, by social power and stigma, by myths and nightmares. And as with other strongly held beliefs, our fears are dear to us. When we encounter information that contradicts our beliefs, as Slovic found in one of his studies, we tend to doubt the information, not ourselves.

Assorted theories have been advanced to explain confirmation bias—why people rush to embrace information that supports their beliefs while rejecting information that disputes them: that first impressions are difficult to dislodge, that there’s a primitive instinct to defend one’s turf, that people tend to have emotional rather than intellectual responses to being challenged and are loath to carefully examine evidence. Group dynamics only exaggerate these tendencies, the author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein observed in his book Going to Extremes: insularity often means limited information input (and usually information that reinforces preexisting views) and a desire for peer approval; and if the group’s leader “does not encourage dissent and is inclined to an identifiable conclusion, it is highly likely that the group as a whole will move toward that conclusion.” Once the group has been psychologically walled off, Sunstein wrote, “the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarization as group members continue to talk.” In fact, groups of like-minded people can become breeding grounds for extreme movements. “Terrorists are made, not born,” Sunstein observed, “and terrorist networks often operate in just this way. As a result, they can move otherwise ordinary people to violent acts.

Do people know which risks lead to many deaths and which risks lead to few?” the legal scholar Cass Sunstein asks. “They do not. In fact, they make huge blunders.” Sunstein draws this observation from the work of Paul Slovic, author of The Perception of Risk.

Multiple international bodies have specified that the absence of scientific evidence of potential damage is not sufficient justification for taking risks. As the jurist Cass Sunstein points out, the precautionary principle is costly, and when interpreted strictly it can be paralyzing.

There is a new wave of interest in exploring how to frame choices so that people make better decisions. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, professors of economics and law, respectively, teamed up to write Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which advocates using defaults to nudge us to make better choices.9 Even when we are choosing in our own interests, we often choose unwisely. When employees have the option of participating in a retirement-savings scheme, many do not, despite the financial advantages of doing so. If their employer instead automatically enrolls them, giving them the choice of opting out, participation jumps dramatically

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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).

One important error that the judges make is what American legal scholar Cass Sunstein calls “current offense bias”—that is, when they make decisions about bail, they focus too much on the specific offense the defendant has been accused of. Defendants whose track record suggests they’re a high risk are treated as low risk if they’re accused of a minor crime, and defendants whose track record suggests they’re low risk are treated as high risk if the current offense is serious. There’s valuable information here that the algorithm puts to good use, but the human judges—for all their intelligence, experience, and training—tend to overlook it.

Recent research cited by Cass Sunstein, for example, has shown that people with a particular political orientation who join a like-minded group emerge from that group with stronger political leanings than they started with. “In almost every group,” Sunstein writes, “people ended up with more extreme positions …. The result is group polarization, which occurs when like-minded people interact and end up in a more extreme position in line with their original inclinations.” And with the Internet added to the fundamentalist equation, it is now easier than ever for extremists of all types to find their ideological soul mates and reinforce their radical thinking.

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.

After all, behavioral economists have spent years demonstrating the clear relationship between making something easy to do and getting people to actually do it. My very good friend and longtime collaborator Richard Thaler puts it this way: “My number-one mantra from Nudge [his book, cowritten with Cass Sunstein, on the application of behavioral economic principles to public policy] is, ‘Make it easy.’ When I say make it easy, what I mean is, if you want to get somebody to do something, make it easy. If you want to get people to eat healthier foods, then put healthier foods in the cafeteria, and make them easier to find, and make them taste better. So in every meeting I say, ‘Make it easy.’ It’s kind of obvious, but it’s also easy to miss.”7

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.

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.

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

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

This would happen in any time period, but in an electronic age these processes are likely to occur much faster and have more profound effects. As trust levels continue to plummet, people stop trusting mainstream politicians and mainstream newspapers, a process we are already observing. They will begin to assume – as a matter of course – that these people and news sources are deceiving them and, as we have seen, on many key matters they will be correct. They will turn to alternative news sources and vote for alternative political figures. As jurist Cass Sunstein (2018) has explored, this will create an echo chamber effect whereby people will increasingly only be hearing the viewpoints which they already accept. This will help to further cement a divided, Balkanized, and untrusting society. Concomitantly, we will expect Finnish society – like all European societies – to become increasingly diverse in terms of worldview, as the ‘spiteful mutants’ spread their views which, through a virtue-signalling arms race to appear ever more caring, will become more and more extreme.

En años siguientes, diversos escépticos, desde Evgeny Morozov hasta Cass Sunstein, ahondaron en aquella vertiente crítica insinuada por Diamond. Los mayores defensores de Twitter y Facebook, argumentó Morozov, creían que estas nuevas tecnologías reformarían el contexto local, conectarían a antiguos enemigos y permitirían superar odios del pasado. Pero, en realidad, la posibilidad inversa parecía aproximarse más a la verdad: los diferentes contextos locales serían los que condicionarían y darían una nueva forma a herramientas como Facebook, que podrían ser emancipadoras en ciertos contextos, pero reforzarían el poder autocrático —o incitarían al odio racial— en otros.16

Some of the most illuminating work on information-seeking emphasizes “strategic self-ignorance,” understood as “the use of ignorance as an excuse to over-indulge in pleasurable activities that may be harmful to one’s future self.

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.

Sometimes a reasonable way to deal with a decisional burden is to adopt a routine.

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.

A possible way of simplifying a difficult situation at the time of choice is to make a small, incremental decision, and to leave other questions for another day. When a personal decision involves imponderable and apparently incommensurable elements, people often take small, reversible steps first.

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.

Sometimes the difficulty of decision, or symmetry among the options, pushes people to decide on a random basis. They might, for example, flip a coin, decide in favor of the option they see first, or make some apparently irrelevant factor decisive

A familiar way of handling decisional burdens is to delegate the decision to someone else.

People often use heuristic devices, or mental shortcuts, as a way of bypassing the need for individualized choice.

Recall that second-order strategies differ in the extent to which they produce decisional burdens and mistakes. Those burdens might be emotional; it might be unpleasant to make decisions on the spot, and second-order strategies might reduce or eliminate that unpleasantness. Those burdens might be cognitive; it might take a lot of time and energy to make decisions on the spot, and second-order strategies might be a blessing.

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.

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).

Most of the focus is on decisions about decisions, but (a confession) the lens will occasionally shift to decisions, period.

Chapter 3 deals with the decision whether to know. Knowledge is power, as they say, but ignorance is bliss, as they also say. They are right on both counts. The challenge is to know whether we have a knowledge-is-power situation or an ignorance-is-bliss situation.

Chapter 5 looks at beliefs in general. It suggests that beliefs are, in a sense, like goods, and we decide whether to “buy” them. We often make a rapid decision: If I believe this, will my life be better? How?

Chapter 6 turns to the problem of inconsistency in decisions. With respect to

Second-order decisions involve the strategies that people use in order to avoid getting into an ordinary decision-making situation in the first instance.

There are important issues here about cognitive burdens and also about responsibility, equality, and fairness.

People have diverse second-order strategies, and a main goal here is to identify them and to understand why one or another might be best.

As we shall see, these strategies differ in the extent to which they produce mistakes and also in the extent to which they impose informational, moral, and other burdens on the agent and on others, either before the process of ultimate decision or during the process of ultimate decision.

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.

Members of a democratic public will not do well if they are unable to appreciate the views of their fellow citizens, if they believe “fake news,” or if they see one another as enemies or adversaries in some kind of war.

In the case of “pure” solidarity goods, people care about the sheer number of consumers, and in the case of partnership goods, people care about who the consumers are.

But because of comparison friction – defined as people’s unwillingness to obtain comparative information, even when it is available – a problem of evaluability in separate evaluation might persist.

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.

For ending a relationship or quitting a job, for example, the clear implication is that people are more likely to err if they decide to be cautious than if they decide to take some kind of plunge.10 The challenge for individuals, of course, is that statistical generalizations cannot resolve hard questions.

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.

Typical situations for small steps thus involve a serious risk of unintended bad consequences because a large decision looms when people lack sufficient information; hence reversibility is especially important.

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.

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.

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.

But the preceding points suggest an additional class of goods, call them fraternity goods, where people care about fellow consumers falling under a certain description or belonging to a particular category (e.g., students, Catholics, athletes).

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

I offer a simple claim here, one that is meant to offer two-and-a-half cheers for deciding by algorithm. The claim is that algorithms can overcome the harmful effects of cognitive biases, which often have a strong hold on people whose job it is to avoid them, and whose training and experience might be expected to allow them to do so.