Conformity

by Cass R Sunstein

  4 See Andrew F. Daughety and Jennifer F. Reinganum, Stampede to Judgment, 1 Am. L. & Econ. Rev. 158 (1999).

  5 I draw here on David Hirshleifer, The Blind Leading the Blind, in The New Economics of Human Behavior 188, 193–94 (Marianno Tommasi and Kathryn Ierulli eds. 1995).

  6 Id. at 195. For valuable treatments, with an emphasis on people’s failure to see the extent to which their predecessors simply followed others, see Erik Eyster and Matthew Rabin, Naïve Herding in Rich-Information Settings, 2 Am. Econ. J.: Microecon. 221 (2010); and Erik Eyster and Matthew Rabin, Extensive Imitation Is Harmful and Irrational, 129 Q.J. Econ. 1861 (2014).

  7 See Gina Kolata, Risk of Breast Cancer Halts Hormone Replacement Study, New York Times, at www.nytimes.com (July 11, 2002).

  8 Hirshleifer, supra note 5, at 204.

  9 John F. Burnum, Medical Practice a la Mode, 317 New Eng. J. Med. 1201, 1220 (1987).

  10 See Sushil Bikhchandani et al., Learning from the Behavior of Others: Conformity, Fads, and Informational Cascades, 12 J. Econ. Persp. 151, 167 (1998).

  11 See Tim O’Shea, The Creation of a Market: How Did the Whole HRT Thing Get Started in the First Place?, Mercola, at www.mercola.com (July 2001).

  12 See Eric Talley, Precedential Cascades: An Appraisal, 73 So. Cal. L. Rev. 87 (1999).

  13 See Daughety and Reinganum, supra note 4, at 161–65.

  14 See Lisa Anderson and Charles Holt, Information Cascades in the Laboratory, 87 Am. Econ. Rev. 847 (1997).

  15 See Angela Hung and Charles Plott, Information Cascades: Replication and an Extension to Majority Rule and Conformity-Rewarding Institutions, 91 Am. Econ. Rev. 1508, 1515 (2001).

  16 Thus 72 percent of subjects followed Bayes’s rule in the Anderson/Holt experiment, and 64 percent in Marc Willinger and Anthony Ziegelmeyet, Are More Informed Agents Able to Shatter Information Cascades in the Lab, in The Economics of Networks: Interaction and Behaviours 291, 304 (Patrick Cohendet et al. eds. 1996).

  17 See id. at 291.

  18 Anderson and Holt, supra note 14, at 859.

  19 See Hirshleifer, supra note 5, at 197–98.

  20 See Willinger and Ziegelmeyet, supra note 16.

  21 See id. at 305.

  22 See Cass R. Sunstein, #Republic (2016), for some ideas.

  23 See Hung and Plott, supra. note 15, at 1511.

  24 See id. at 1517.

  25 See id. at 1515.

  26 See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Utilitarianism: On Liberty; Considerations on Representative Government (H. B. Acton ed. 1972).

  27 Joseph Henrich et al., Group Report: What Is the Role of Culture in Bounded Rationality?, in Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox 356 (Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten eds. 2001).

  28 Edward Parson, Richard Zeckhauser, and Cary Coglianese, Collective Silence and Individual Voice: The Logic of Information Games, in Collective Choice: Essays in Honor of Mancur Olson 31 (J. Heckelman and D. Coates eds. 2003).

  29 See Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies (1997). See also Christina Bicchieri and Yoshitaka Fukui, The Great Illusion: Ignorance, Informational Cascades, and the Persistence of Unpopular Norms, in Experience, Reality, and Scientific Explanation 89, 108–14 (M. C. Galavotti and A. Pagnini eds. 1999). For an engaging discussion, see Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point (1999).

  30 See Hans Christian Anderson, The Emperor’s New Suit, in Shorter Tales (Jean Hersholt trans. 1948; originally published 1837).

  31 See Henrich et al., supra note 27, at 357.

  32 See Hung and Plott, supra note 15, at 1515–17.

  33 Id. at 1516.

  34 See Parson, Zeckhauser, and Coglianese, supra note 28.

  35 See id. for helpful discussion.

  36 David Grann, Stalking Dr. Steere, New York Times, at 52 (July 17, 2001).

  37 See Bicchieri and Fukui, supra note 29, at 93.

  38 Andrew Higgins, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad-Cow World, Wall Street Journal, at A13 (March 12, 2001; internal quotation marks omitted).

  39 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution 155 (Stuart Gilbert trans. 1955).

  40 See Russell Hardin, The Crippled Epistemology of Extremism, in Political Rationality and Extremism 3, 16 (Albert Breton et al. eds. 2002).

  41 Bicchieri and Fukui, supra note 29, at 114.

  42 See Kuran, supra note 29.

  43 See, for example, Larry Thompson, The Corporate Scandals: Why They Happened and Why They May Not Happen Again, Brookings Institution (2004; recounting the history of the Corporatep-Fraud Task Force); and Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, Pub. L. 107–204 (2002).

  44 Judge Puts Pledge of Allegiance Decision on Hold, Bulletin’s Frontrunner, at www.lexis.com (June 28, 2002).

  45 For a good discussion, see Kuran, supra note 29.

  46 See id.

  47 See id.

  48 Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain 39 (1994).

  49 See Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines (1983).

  50 See Edwin Cameron, AIDS Denial in South Africa, 5 Green Bag 415, 416–19 (2002).

  51 See F. A. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society, 35 Am. Econ. Rev. 519 (1945).

  52 For an overview, see Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment (Thomas Gilovich et al. eds. 2002).

  53 See, for example, Roger Noll and James Krier, Some Implications of Cognitive Psychology for Risk Regulation, 19 J. Legal Stud. 747 (1991).

  54 See Paul Slovic, The Perception of Risk 40 (2000).

  55 See Kuran and Sunstein, supra note 3.

  Chapter 3. Group Polarization

  1 See Roger Brown, Social Psychology 203–26 (2d ed. 1985). At first glance, group polarization might be seen to be in tension with the Condorcet jury theorem, which holds that when people are answering a common question with two answers, one false and one true, and when the average probability that each voter will answer correctly exceeds 50 percent, the probability of a correct answer, by a majority of the group, increases to certainty as the size of the group increases. For a good overview, see Paul H. Edelman, On Legal Interpretations of the Condorcet Jury Theorem, 31 J. Legal Stud. 327, 329–34 (2002). The importance of the theorem lies in the demonstration that groups are likely to do better than individuals, and large groups better than small ones, if majority rule is used and if each person is more likely than not to be correct. But when group polarization is involved, individuals do not make judgments on their own; they are influenced by the judgments of others. When interdependent judgments are being made, and when some people are wrong, it is not at all clear that groups will do better than individuals. For empirical evidence, see Norbert Kerr et al., Bias in Judgment: Comparing Individuals and Groups, 103 Psychol. Rev. 687 (1996). On some of the theoretical issues, see David Austen-Smith and J. S. Banks, Information Aggregation, Rationality, and the Condorcet Jury Theorem, 90 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 34 (1996).

  2 See Brown, supra note 1, at 204.

  3 See id. at 224.

  4 See Albert Breton and Silvana Dalmazzone, Information Control, Loss of Autonomy, and the Emergence of Political Extremism 53–55 (Albert Breton et al. eds. 2002).

  5 Group polarization can occur, however, as a result of mere exposure to the views of others. See Robert Baron et al., Group Process, Group Decision, Group Action 74 (2d ed. 1999).

  6 See David Schkade, Cass R. Sunstein, and Daniel Kahneman, Deliberating about Dollars: The Severity Shift, 100 Colum. L. Rev. 1139 (2001).

  7 See id. at 1152, 1154–55.

  8 See Cass R. Sunstein et al., Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide 32–33 (2002).

  9 See id. at 36.

  10 See Schkade et al., supra note 6, at 1152, showing that in the top five outrage cases, the mean shift was 11 percent higher than in any other class of cases. The effect is more dramatic still for dollars. See id., where high-dollar awards shifted upward by a significant margin. This finding is closely connected to another one: extremists are most likely to shift, and likely to shift most, as a result of discussions with one anot
her. See John Turner et al., Rediscovering the Social Group 154–59 (1987).

  11 See Sharon Groch, Free Spaces: Creating Oppositional Spaces in the Disability Rights Movement, in Oppositional Consciousness 65, 67–72 (Jane Mansbridge and Aldon Morris eds. 2001).

  12 See Baron et al., Group Process, supra note 5, at 77.

  13 See R. Hightower and L. Sayeed, The Impact of Computer-Mediated Communication Systems on Biased Group Discussion, 11 Computers in Human Behavior 33 (1995).

  14 Patricia Wallace, The Psychology of the Internet 82 (2000).

  15 See Brown, supra note 1, at 200–45; and Sunstein, supra note 8.

  16 See Brown, supra note 1, at 217–22.

  17 See Caryn Christensen and Ann Abbott, Team Medical Decision Making, in Decision Making in Health Care 271 (Gretchen Chapman and Frank A. Sonnenberg eds. 2000).

  18 See Robert Baron et al., Social Corroboration and Opinion Extremity, 32 J. Experimental Soc. Psychol. 537 (1996).

  19 Id.

  20 See Chip Heath and Richard Gonzales, Interaction with Others Increases Decision Confidence but Not Decision Quality: Evidence against Information Collection Views of Interactive Decision Making, 61 Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 305–26 (1997).

  21 See Brown, supra note 1, at 213–17.

  22 See Baron et al., Group Process, supra note 5, at 74.

  23 See id. at 77.

  24 See Schkade et al., supra note 6, at 1152, 1155–56.

  25 See id. at 1140.

  26 See id. at 1161–62.

  27 See Christensen and Abbott, supra note 17, at 269.

  28 See Timothy Cason and Vai-Lam Mui, A Laboratory Study of Group Polarisation in the Team Dictator Game, 107 Econ. J. 1465 (1997).

  29 See id.

  30 See id. at 1468–72.

  31 This is a lesson of the study of punitive damage awards, where groups with extreme medians showed the largest shifts; see Schkade et al., supra note 6, at 1152. For other evidence, see Turner et al., supra note 10, at 158.

  32 See Maryla Zaleska, The Stability of Extreme and Moderate Responses in Different Situations, in Group Decision Making 163, 164 (H. Brandstetter, J. H. Davis, and G. Stocker-Kreichgauer eds. 1982).

  33 See Dominic Abrams et al., Knowing What to Think by Knowing Who You Are: Self-Categorization and the Nature of Norm Formation, Conformity, and Group Polarization, 29 British J. Soc. Psychol. 97, 112 (1990).

  34 See Hans Brandstatter, Social Emotions in Discussion Groups, in Dynamics of Group Decisions (Hans Brandstatter et al. eds. 1978). Turner et al., supra note 10, at 154–59, attempt to use this evidence as a basis for a new synthesis, one that they call “a self-categorization theory of group polarization.” Id. at 154.

  35 See Brandstatter, supra note 34. See Turner et al., supra note 10, at 154–59, for the especially interesting implication that a group of comparative extremists will show a comparatively greater shift toward extremism. See id. at 158.

  36 See Turner et al., supra note 10, at 151.

  37 See id.

  38 See Russell Spears, Martin Lee, and Stephen Lee, De-individuation and Group Polarization in Computer-Mediated Communication, 29 Brit. J. Soc. Psych. 123–24 (1990).

  39 See Russell Hardin, The Crippled Epistemology of Extremism, in Political Rationality and Extremism (Albert Breton et al. eds. 2002).

  40 See James Fishkin and Robert Luskin, Bringing Deliberation to the Democratic Dialogue, in The Poll with a Human Face 3, 29–31 (Maxwell McCombs and Amy Reynolds eds. 1999).

  41 See Alan Blinder and John Morgan, Are Two Heads Better than One? An Experimental Analysis of Group vs. Individual Decisionmaking, NBER Working Paper 7909 (2000).

  42 See id. at 44–46.

  43 See Eugene Burnstein, Persuasion as Argument Processing, in Group Decision Making (H. Brandstetter, J. H. Davis, and G. Stocker-Kreichgauer eds. 1982).

  44 See Brown, supra note 1, at 225.

  45 See Amiram Vinokur and Eugene Burnstein, The Effects of Partially Shared Persuasive Arguments on Group-Induced Shifts, 29 J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 305 (1974).

  46 See id.

  47 Brown, supra note 1, at 226.

  48 Id.

  49 See Abrams et al., supra note 33, at 112.

  Chapter 4. Law and Institutions

  1 See Mathew Adler, Expressivist Theories of Law: A Skeptical Overview, 148 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1363 (2000).

  2 See Robert Kagan and Jerome Skolnick, Banning Smoking: Compliance without Enforcement, in Smoking Policy: Law, Politics, and Culture (Robert L. Rabin ed. 1999).

  3 See id.

  4 Id. at 72.

  5 See id. at 72–73.

  6 Id. at 78.

  7 See Dan M. Kahan, Gentle Nudges v. Hard Shoves: Solving the Sticky Norms Problem, 67 U. Chi. L. Rev. 607 (2000).

  8 Some of the underlying evidence is discussed in Cass R. Sunstein, Simpler (2013).

  9 Kagan and Skolnick, supra note 2, at 78.

  10 See Stephen Coleman, Minnesota Department of Revenue, The Minnesota Income Tax Compliance Experiment State Tax Results 1, 5–6, 18–19 (1996), at http://www.state.mn.us.

  11 See H. Wesley Perkins, College Student Misperceptions of Alcohol and Other Drug Norms among Peers, in Designing Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention Programs in Higher Education 177–206 (U.S. Department of Education ed. 1997).

  12 See Luther Gulick, Administrative Reflections from World War II 120–25 (1948).

  13 Id. at 120.

  14 Id. at 121.

  15 Id. at 120–23.

  16 Id. at 125.

  17 Id.

  18 Id. See also Irving Janis, Groupthink (2d ed. 1982), for a set of examples of errors within democracies, when relevant institutions do not encourage dissent.

  19 See Gulick, supra note 12, at 125.

  20 Brutus, Essays of Brutus, in 2 The Complete Anti-Federalist 369 (H. Storing ed. 1980).

  21 Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 70, at 426–37 (Clinton Rossiter ed. 1961). Compare Asch’s claim: “The clash of views generates events of far-reaching importance. I am induced to take up a particular standpoint, to view my own action as another views it. . . . Now I have within me two standpoints, my own and that of the other; both are now part of my way of thinking. In this way the limitations of my individual thinking are transcended by including the thoughts of others. I am now open to more alternatives than my own unaided comprehension would make possible. Disagreements, when their causes are intelligible, can enrich and strengthen, rather than injure, our sense of objectivity.” Solomon Asch, Social Psychology 131–32 (1952). From a quite different discipline, John Rawls writes in similar terms: “In everyday life the exchange of opinion with others checks our partiality and widens our perspective; we are made to see things from the standpoint of others and the limits of our vision are brought home to us. . . . 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.” John Rawls, A Theory of Justice 358–59 (1971). The idea can be traced to Aristotle, suggesting that when diverse groups “all come together . . . they may surpass—collectively and as a body, although not individually—the quality of the few best. . . . When there are many who contribute to the process of deliberation, each can bring his share of goodness and moral prudence; . . . some appreciate one part, some another, and all together appreciate all.” Aristotle, Politics 123 (E. Barker trans. 1972). Much of my discussion here has been devoted to showing why and under what circumstances this view might or might not be true.

  22 Roger Sherman, 1 Annals of Congress 733–45 (Joseph Gale ed. 1789).

  23 James Wilson, Lectures on Law, in 1 The Works of James Wilson 291 (Robert Green McCloskey ed., 1967).

  24 3 The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, at 359 (Max Farrand ed., rev. ed. 1966).

/>   25 Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 78, at 528 (J. Cooke ed. 1961).

  26 James Madison, Report of 1800, January 7, 1800, in 17 Papers of James Madison 344, 346 (David Mattern et al. eds. 1991).

  27 See Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, 418 US 241 (1974) (striking down a right-of-reply law).