How Change Happens
Cass R. Sunstein
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2019 Cass R. Sunstein
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Stone by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sunstein, Cass R., author.
Title: How change happens / Cass R. Sunstein.
Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018026995 | ISBN 9780262039574 (hardcover : alk. paper)
eISBN 9780262351898
Subjects: LCSH: Social change. | Social groups. | Common good. | Decision making
Classification: LCC HM831 .S86 2019 | DDC 303.4--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018026995
ePub Version 1.0
Opposition? How would anybody know? How would anybody know what somebody else opposes or doesn’t oppose? That a man says he opposes or doesn’t oppose depends upon the circumstances, where, and when, and to whom, and just how he says it. And then you still must guess why he says what he says. So, too, even in action.
—Carl Klingelhofer, former Nazi1
If I had known that not a single lunch counter would open as a result of my action I could not have done differently than I did. If I had known violence would result, I could not have done differently than I did. I am thankful for the sit-ins if for no other reason than that they provided me with an opportunity for making a slogan into a reality, by turning a decision into an action. It seems to me that this is what life is all about.
—Sandra Cason2
We are all Expressionists part of the time. Sometimes we just want to scream loudly at injustice, or to stand up and be counted. These are noble motives, but any serious revolutionist must often deprive himself of the pleasures of self-expression. He must judge his actions by their ultimate effects on institutions.
—Herbert Simon3
Notes
1. Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free 93 (1955/2017).
2. James Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago 52 (1987).
3. Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life 281 (1991).
Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Epigraphs
Preface
I Norms and Values 1 Unleashed
2 The Law of Group Polarization
3 The Expressive Function of Law
II The Uses and Limits of Nudges 4 Nudging: A Very Short Guide
5 Forcing Choices
6 Welfare
7 Nudges That Fail
8 Ethics
9 Control
10 Coercion
11 On Preferring A to B, While Also Preferring B to A
III Excursions 12 Transparency
13 Precautions
14 Moral Heuristics
15 Rights
16 Partyism
Closing Words
Acknowledgments
Index
Preface
A few decades ago, I testified in Congress about President Bill Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which allowed gays and lesbians to serve in the US military, but only on condition that they did not disclose their sexual orientation. After my testimony, a member of Congress came up to me and said to me, with evident nostalgia, “In my day, we didn’t have any homosexuals.” He paused and added, “Well, maybe we had one. There was a guy who lived by himself, up on a hill.”
How does social change happen? One answer points to the role of social norms, which can be both powerful (in the sense that they greatly affect behavior) and fragile (in the sense that they can collapse in a short time). If norms lead people to silence themselves, a status quo can persist—even if some or many people hate it, and even if those who seem to support it are actually pretty indifferent to it. One day, someone challenges the norm. Maybe it’s a child who says that the Emperor has no clothes. Maybe it’s a guy who lives by himself, up on a hill. After that small challenge, others may begin to say what they think. Once that happens, a drip can become a flood.
Most of us live, at least some of the time, in accordance with norms that we abhor. We might not think about them; they are part of life’s furniture. But in our heart of hearts, we abhor them. The problem is that none of us can change a norm on our own. To be sure, we can defy a norm, but defiance comes at a cost, and it may end up entrenching rather than undermining existing norms. What is needed is some kind of movement, initiated by people who say that they disapprove of the norm, and succeeding when some kind of tipping point is reached, by which time it is socially costless, and maybe beneficial, and maybe even mandatory, to say: Me Too.
That’s a stylized version of what has happened with respect to sexual orientation in many nations. But the same dynamics help capture a host of social movements, including those that involve Catholicism, the French Revolution, the creation of Israel, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the collapse of the Soviet Union, disability discrimination, age discrimination, animal rights, the rise of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Brexit, nationalism, white supremacy, and the abolition of slavery. These movements are of course different in important ways. Some of them are unambiguously good, while others are harder to evaluate, and still others are deeply troubling. But in all of them, suppressed beliefs and values, including suppressed outrage, started to get some oxygen. Once they did, change was inevitable.
It was also hard or perhaps impossible to anticipate those social movements. A central reason is that because people falsified their preferences, individuals did not know what their fellow citizens actually thought. In the face of preference falsification, the circumstances are right for unleashing social change—but because preferences are falsified, few people may be aware of that fact.
Another reason for the unpredictability is the overriding importance of social interactions. For change to occur, interactions need to produce, at just the right times and places, a growing sense that an existing norm is vulnerable, and that may or may not happen. Serendipity might be crucial. Who talks to whom at the right point? What is covered in the right newspaper? Who retweets what, and exactly when?
Science fiction writers like to explore “counterfactual history”—historical arcs in which the South won the Civil War, Hitler devoted his entire life to painting, John F. Kennedy wasn’t assassinated, or Donald Trump decided to ramp up his real estate activities rather than to run for president. At their most intriguing, counterfactual histories emphasize small shifts (or nudges) that produced massive changes; they make it plausible to think that with a little push or pull, whole nations might have ended up looking radically different.
Because history is only run once, we can’t know when that’s true. But we do observe large shifts in short time frames. If we have a sense of the mechanisms that account for those shifts, we might be newly aware of the extent to which things we now take for granted were not exactly predestined, and of how with a little pressure at the right time, the coming decades might take startlingly different courses. (I know that these claims raise many questions; I will explore them in due course.)
This book consists of sixteen chapters. While they do not make for a unitary narrative, they are connected by an effort to connect findings in behavioral science w
ith enduring issues in law and policy, and by an effort to show how seemingly small perturbations can often produce big shifts. The first three chapters explore the power of social norms; the importance of social cascades; the phenomenon of group polarization; and the expressive function of law. I emphasize that in many cases, people are unleashed, for better or for worse, and that in other cases, something very different happens, as people end up holding views that they would not have entertained before. A general theme is the shift from the unsayable, and even the unthinkable, to the conventional wisdom (and vice-versa).
Chapters 4–11 explore the uses and limits of “nudges” as tools for change. The question here is how public or private institutions might shift behavior, and sometimes unleash it, through seemingly small steps.
Nudges are choice-preserving interventions, informed by behavioral science, that can greatly affect people’s choices. There is nothing new about nudging. In Genesis, God nudged: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die.” The serpent was a nudger as well: “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” With a threat and a promise, and distinctive framing, God and the serpent preserved freedom of choice.
In recent years, public officials have started to become quite disciplined about the project of nudging, often drawing on the latest behavioral research. Sometimes they have gone beyond nudges, enlisting findings about human error, including “present bias” and unrealistic optimism, to justify mandates and bans (or taxes, as in the case of soda, alcohol, and cigarettes). Here I attempt to explore the most pressing current issues, which turn out to raise deep questions in multiple fields, including law, economics, and political philosophy. For example: (1) What are the criteria for evaluating nudges? (2) Which way should we nudge? (3) When do nudges fail? (4) When nudges fail, what should we do instead? (5) Are nudges ethical? (5) What about people’s desire to control their own destiny?
In the process of answering these questions, I emphasize two points that are in some tension with each other. The first involves the importance of human agency. People often say: Don’t tell me what I can’t do! That plea, a cry of the human spirit, demonstrates that people place a premium on their ability to control the course of their lives. It should be understood, appreciated, and (I think) cherished.
The second point involve the legitimate use of coercion. In some cases, a mandate or a ban is well-justified, at least if we care about human welfare. Consider bans on trans fats; social security programs; energy efficiency requirements; and cigarette taxes. For the last decade, nudges have dominated official discussions of the use of behavioral science. Because of the importance of freedom and agency, that’s nothing to lament. But we are at the early stages of thinking more carefully about more aggressive tools—and of defining the circumstances in which they make sense, if we really care about human welfare (and I shall have something to say about that disputed concept).
Chapters 12–16 explore issues at the intersection of public policy, behavioral science, and political philosophy. I argue that transparency is often crucial, because it promotes accountability and also allows people to obtain information that they can use to improve their own lives. Transparency can be a terrific nudge, and it often fuels change.
I suggest that the Precautionary Principle, popular in many nations, is a conceptual mess, because it forbids the very steps that it requires—and that we can best understand its popularity, and its apparent lack of messiness, by reference to behavioral science. Perhaps most controversially, I suggest that some of our thinking about human rights is best understood as a product of “moral heuristics”—simple rules of thumb, and generally sensible, but a crude way to get at what most matters, which is human welfare. I conclude with discussions of the rise of “partyism” in the United States. In some ways, partyism is a large obstacle to social change, certainly at the level of national legislation. But as we shall see, it is nonetheless possible to identify promising paths forward.
I
Norms and Values
1
Unleashed
In the late 1980s, when I was a visiting professor at Columbia Law School, I happened to pass, in the hallway near my office, a law student (female) speaking to an older law professor (male). To my amazement, the professor was stroking the student’s hair. I thought I saw, very briefly, a grimace on her face. It was a quick flash. When he left, I said to her, “That was completely inappropriate. He shouldn’t have done that.” Her response was dismissive: “It’s fine. He’s an old man. It’s really not a problem.”
Thirty minutes later, I heard a knock on my door. It was the student. She was in tears. She said, “He does this all the time. It’s horrible. My boyfriend thinks I should make a formal complaint, but I don’t want to do that. Please—I don’t want to make a fuss. Do not talk to him about it and do not tell anyone.” (What I did in response is a tale for another occasion.)
Social norms imposed constraints on what the law student could say or do. She hated what the professor was doing; she felt harassed. After hearing my little comment, she felt free to tell me what she actually thought. But because of existing norms, she did not want to say or do anything.
I am interested here in two different propositions. The first is that that when norms start to collapse, people are unleashed, in the sense that they feel free to reveal what they believe and prefer, to disclose their experiences, and to talk and act as they wish. (Bystanders can of course be important here.) New norms, and laws that entrench or fortify them, may lead to the discovery of preexisting beliefs, preferences, and values. The discovery can be startling. In various times and places, the women’s movement has been an example. The same is true for the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the movement for LGBT rights, and the disability rights movement. It is also true for the pro-life movement.
The second is that revisions of norms can construct preferences and values. New norms, and laws that entrench or fortify them, can give rise to beliefs, preferences, and values that did not exist before. No one is unleashed. People are changed. Something like this can be said for the antismoking movement, the rise of seatbelt-buckling, and the rise of Nazism.
Begin with the phenomenon of unleashing: When certain norms are in force, people falsify their preferences or are silent about them. As a result, strangers and even friends and family members may not be able to know about them.1 People with certain political or religious convictions might just shut up. Once norms are revised, people will reveal preexisting preferences and values, which norms had successfully suppressed. What was once unsayable is said, and what was once unthinkable is done.
In the context of sexual harassment, something like this account is broadly correct: Women disliked being harassed, or even hated it, and revision of old norms was (and remains) necessary to spur expression of their feelings and beliefs.2 (This account is incomplete, and I will complicate it.) As we shall see, law often plays a significant role in fortifying existing norms or in spurring their revision.3 Part of the importance of judicial rulings that forbid sexual harassment is that they contributed to the revision of norms.4 The election of a new leader or the enactment of new legislation5 can have a crucial and even transformative signaling effect, offering people information about what other people think. If people hear the signal, norms may shift, because people are influenced by what they think other people think.6
But some revisions of norms, and some laws that entrench those revisions, do not liberate anything. As norms begin to be altered, people come to hold, or to act as if they hold, preferences and values that they did not hold before. Revisions of norms, and resulting legal reforms, do not uncover suppressed desires; they produce new ones, or at least statements and actions that are consistent with new ones.
Politically Correct
Consider in this regard the idea of “p
olitical correctness,” which is standardly a reference to left-leaning social norms, forbidding the expression of views that defy the left-of-center orthodoxy and so silencing people. Political correctness means that people cannot say what they actually think; they are forced into some kind of closet. (The very term should be seen as an effort to combat existing norms. Part of the cleverness of the term is that it describes those who follow certain views as cowardly conformists, rather than people who are committed to hard-won principles.7) That is often what happens. On many university campuses, those who are right of center learn to shut up. What a terrible lesson: they are leashed. But in other environments, the norms are different, and they can say what they think. Sometimes their friends and associates are surprised, even stunned: “Does he really think that? I had no idea.”
In the educational setting, one problem is that left-of-center students will have no idea about the actual distribution of views within the community. They might think that everyone thinks as they do. Another problem is that people will be less able to learn from one another. And when people say what they actually think, large-scale changes might occur. I taught at the University of Chicago Law School in the early 1980s, when a group of terrific students created the Federalist Society, an organization dedicated to the exploration and defense of conservative views about the American legal system. The Federalist Society has had a massive effect on American political and legal life because it creates a kind of forum, or enclave, in which people can say what they think.
But whether left or right, political correctness can go beyond the suppression of views. It can also reconstruct preferences and values, making certain views unthinkable (for better or for worse). If some view is beyond the pale, people will stop expressing it. Eventually the unthinkable might become unthought. Is that chilling? Sometimes, but sometimes not; it is not terrible if no one thinks pro-Nazi thoughts.
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