Making Sense with Sam Harris - #101 — Defending the Republic

Episode Date: October 17, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Cass Sunstein about the polarization and fragmentation of American society, “choice architecture,” the importance of face-to-face interactions for problem solving, group polarization and identity politics, virtuous extremism, the wisdom of crowds, direct democracy, the limits of free speech, the process of Presidential impeachment, and other topics.  If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Cass Sunstein. Cass is the Robert Walmsley University professor at Harvard Law School, where he is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy.

He is by far the most cited law professor in the United States. Amazing. From 2009 to 2012, he served in the Obama administration as administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has testified before congressional committees, been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of countries, and written many articles and books, including Nudge with Richard Thaler. And Thaler actually won the Nobel Prize in Economics since we recorded this podcast. And he's written other books on his own, two of which are under discussion today.

The first is Hashtag Republic, Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, Republic, Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, and the forthcoming Impeachment, a Citizen's Guide. And Cass and I talk about the polarization and fragmentation of American society. We talk about choice architecture, the importance of face-to-face interactions for problem-solving, group polarization and identity politics, virtuous forms of extremism, the much-vaunted wisdom of crowds, the possibility of ever having a direct democracy, rational limits on free speech, the process of presidential impeachment, and other topics. As I say at the end, I found this conversation truly educational.

There was a lot I didn't understand about impeachment in particular until today. And I hope you find listening to Cass as valuable as I did. And I now bring you Cass Sunstein. I am here with Cass Sunstein. Cass, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much. Great to be here. Before we jump into your book, there are actually two books I want to discuss. I'll start with Hashtag Republic, but perhaps you can just summarize your background. You have a very

diverse background. You've a very diverse background. You've touched a lot of topics. You've served in government. How do you view your decades of work at this point? Work in progress. So I started as a law professor at the University of Chicago after a short stint at the Justice Department. And I guess before that, I had clerked for a couple of judges, including Thurgood Marshall. I was at Chicago for many years. I did some work connected with governments, including our own, but I didn't leave the academy until Barack Obama became president. And then I worked in the White House helping to oversee government regulation for about four years.

After that, I left to be an academic again at Harvard. The president asked me to be on his group on surveillance and national security. I did that for approximately a year. That was a part-time job as I was teaching. I did that for approximately a year. That was a part-time job as I was teaching. And after that, the Defense Department asked me to be on the Defense Innovation Board, which I was on up until quite recently, which works on the subject of national defense and innovation.

Since I left government as a full-time job, that was in late 2012, I've worked with our government and various other governments on strategies that can promote health and increase safety and maybe help employment go up and poverty go down, environmental protection and issues of that kind. And you and I have never met, but we have an editor in common. We've got Thomas Labine linking us. He's edited two of my books. I think he's edited maybe more of yours. He is fantastic. Yeah, he really is.

Thomas is an amazing person and a kind person and also a brilliant editor with real creativity about how to make things go, at least in my experience, in better directions. real creativity about how to make things go, at least in my experience, in better directions. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's great to meet you virtually here. I want to focus on Republic first, and mostly, because it's so timely. I mean, the other book I want to touch at the end, Impeachment, is also super timely. But when did you actually write Republic? It came out earlier this year, but when were you actually write Republic? It came out earlier this year, but when were you actually writing it? I was working on it for approximately, I'd say, 18 months before the election. So I actually finished it right about the time of President Trump's victory. But I'd been thinking hard about it for probably two years before then. It actually builds on earlier work on the question of polarization. But my own experience in Washington and my own observation, I guess, since leaving Washington, kind of fixed me on the issue of polarization and mutual misunderstanding. And that was kind of 2014,

2015 obsession. So you analyze the forces that are leading to increased fragmentation and polarization in our society. And it's fragmentation and polarization of all kinds. It's political, which I'm sure we'll focus on, but it's also moral and intellectual and religious. I mean, every way in which belief systems can be segregated, there's a similar dynamics to what's happening there. The most natural place to start here is with a few of the concepts you introduced very early in the book. And the first is the concept of choice architecture. And this can be summarized with Nicholas Negroponte's rather dystopian idea of what's called the daily me. And many of our listeners will not have heard of either of these phrases while actually living with their implications every day. So perhaps you can explain choice architecture

and its consequences. Dick Thaler, an economist, and I worked on a book called Nudge a few years ago. And one of the driving ideas is if you're in a grocery store or in a cafeteria or on a website, there's actually an architecture for choosing. So a grocery store might have Pepsi there, or it might instead have diet Pepsi there, or it might have carrots, or it might have chocolate bars. And what's at the checkout counter actually matters in terms of what people purchase. And what's approximate and visible, what's eye level actually matters in terms of what people purchase and what's approximate and visible, what's eye level actually matters in terms of what people end up stocking in their refrigerator. So too in a cafeteria, it can be have a choice architecture that favors meat or fish or

vegetables or brownies. And if the designer is smart, they will create an architecture that's good for you or good for them or hopefully good for both you and them. A website designer who is alert to the importance of particular choices will know that if you put things in big font and colorful letters and you make it really simple, you can attract the eye. And the thing that's first on a list is likely to be what people will purchase. And that is a clue for someone who's trying to sell clothes or books. And so choice architecture is really everywhere. A rental car company is engaged in choice architecture. The U.S. government is engaged in choice architecture. So is the state where you live. And so are some of the great forces in society. And so are some of the less great forces in society.

architects when we don't really even think about it. So a teacher of kids is doing choice architecture all the time. So is a doctor who is saying, you know, we have five options for you. Here's the first. And saying that will often bias the decision. Parents are definitely choice architects. I have two small kids and one's five, the other is eight. And they are extremely effective choice architects with respect to their father. They know how to design situations. So it's to get me to do what they want. It's running in the wrong direction. Completely. And I'll run after them, and then we're going in the direction they want.

So for media, both a social media platform like Facebook and a newspaper like, let's say, the Wall Street Journal and a network is a choice architect. Facebook, let's take as an example, can have a news feed that has one kind of default choices. So it can say, you know, we know from your choices and from our algorithm, this is the kind of thing that you look at. Or we know that this is the kind of thing that most people look at. And it can feed you stuff that fits with your own political convictions. Or it can feed you stuff that fits kind of with what the median person in your state likes. Or it can feed you stuff that is serendipitous and diverse.

And that's also true of the local newspaper, which can say, I'll provide you an assortment of things that it's probably good for someone in your area to know about, or which can think, you know, most of our readers, they are right of center, they are left of center, or we are right of center and left of center, and we're going to provide that perspective. So that's choice architecture too. So choice architecture is everywhere. The term kind of suggests, I hope helpfully, that the architecture that we often just take as kind of a background fact or furniture of life often will have big effects on what we end up selecting. The idea of Daily Me, which comes from the farsighted Nicholas Negroponte, actually comes from a pretty long time ago, the 1990s. And he said, you know, we're not going to have TV stations

and general interest newspapers so much in the future. We're going to have a system where every person can design his or her daily me. So if your name is Bob, you can create the daily Bob. And suppose what you're most interested in is Star Wars that can highlight Star Wars on your screen. And suppose what you really think is the problem of unlawful immigration is spiraling out of control. Those are your political focus. Your daily me can tell you both about the immigration problem, and it can talk about it in a way that you find congenial rather than silly or unhelpful. And so the daily Bob can look one way, the Daily Mary can look a completely different way. And in a way, Silicon Valley has, for a long time, seen this power of

personalized choice architecture, let's call it, as the ideal. That's heaven, that's democracy, that's freedom. So that each of us gets a news diet that isn't what anyone else thinks we need, but is specifically based on our own values and tastes. And obviously the incentives for these companies run in the direction of more perfectly fulfilling this formula. And so what we have essentially is an arms race for people's attention. And the daily me version of things one would expect would be stickier. You know, if you can deliver me information which I find captivating, and the algorithm keeps prioritizing that, and I can be captivated by outrage, I can be captivated by desire

You know the ads get better and better at actually delivering me things that I will be tempted to buy You know the incentives seem aligned to fulfill Negroponte's Idea it's a very What is it, promising or seductive business model, either for a startup or for an established company. A few years ago, I was traveling a lot and I found myself getting on my Facebook page, a lot of luggage ads. And how'd they know? I was in the market for luggage. They figured it out. They were right. And I was much more likely to click on luggage ads than I would be to click on ads for, let's say, sneakers. And they knew that. And that is in their economic interest. So if you're a political

candidate, let's say, who wants to win a particular state, if you know these people will like me better if I suggest that I'm with them on this issue, or those people are likely to give me money if they see my face over the following five words, then you can get very, very precise. And as you say, that's the incentive of someone who wants to win an election. So both for companies and for political aspirants, and it looks like the Russian government, by the way, knew about this in their role in the US 2016 election, there is a business model that suggests that building on the idea of the daily me is a good one. Now, there's some reasons to think that people are a little more complicated than that. And there may be other business models that are as good or better. But certainly,

we can call it the business model of the aughts, meaning the first decade of the 21st century. The daily me model has been all the rage. So in opposition to this, you discuss the value of what you call serendipity. You've already used the word. And also irritation and shared experience. Describe what you mean by those three things. Okay, so there are three very different ideas. The idea of serendipity means that in a great city, large or small, it may be that when you go around the corner, you'll see a Lebanese restaurant or a

sports event that you didn't know you had any interest in. Maybe the sports event is soccer, and you thought you were bored by soccer, but whoa, those kids are pretty good. Or the Lebanese restaurant you never tried, but looks interesting. And you might see some of the times a political protest about something. It might be Black Lives Matter, or it might be abortion is murder. And you might learn from that both what your fellow citizens think, and you might also think to yourself for a moment, maybe more than a moment, gosh, I didn't know that that was on the view screen of my neighbors, and maybe they have a point. And that can change your mind, it can change your life, and can certainly broaden your horizon. So the idea of serendipity

is that a good choice architecture, let's call it, for communications has a lot of surprises in it. And some of these words aren't the most familiar. Choice architecture probably has too many vowels or something. The word architecture has a lot of them. show that interests you, you'll see stuff that you never would have specifically said you want to hear about that. But it could be stuff that will be the most important thing you see that week or hear that week. So you might hear something about a problem or an initiative in India. And while you thought you had no interest in India, the problem is something that alarms you or the initiative is something that you think, gosh, the whole world can learn from that, maybe benefit from that. And that can be, you know, super important for people. And I think in individual lives, if you think about what your job is or what you're reading

or who you're married to or who your friends are or how you got to do the thing you're doing a few hours from now, chances are there's broadening and also togetherness in a non-cornball, non-hallmark card way. So that's serendipity. Now let's talk about irritation. It may be that if you were reading, let's say, a good daily newspaper, you'll encounter an editorial or a column that thinks exactly the opposite of what you think. So you might be inclined to think, you know, I like a $15 minimum wage. I think Senator Sanders is on the right track in calling for that. But then you might read something that says a $15 minimum wage is actually going to be terrible for the economy, and it's going to be very harmful for people at the bottom of the economic ladder, because employers aren't going to hire as many people if they have to hire people who,

for $15 an hour, they'll hire them at 10, but not at 15. And so the minimum wage actually hurts the poor. That, if you like the minimum wage, reading that is very irritating. It's not congenial. If you like the minimum wage, reading that is very irritating. It's not congenial, but you might think, oh, maybe that's true. Or if you think that President Trump is on the right track on issue A, B, or C, and then you read something that suggests he's all wrong, it might be very irritating, but it might move you. So irritation can be good. Also, meaning it's productive of learning and kind of understanding what our fellow citizens think. And you might also learn something that will produce a shared experience. to something great, like a celebration of something very good that's happened in a community, or July 4th. I would actually single out July 4th because of what brings Americans together. It's a shared experience, and that can create some social glue for people who might otherwise think of one another as, you know, occupants of the same country, but kind of enemies. To be clear, it's not just the information bubble we're talking about. We're talking about a lack of face-to-face interaction in many cases.

So there's the whole phenomenon of telecommuting. In fact, you and I are telecommuting right now to do this interview. And so this interview is made possible by this great technology, but this technology is enabling, in this case, me to do the vast majority of my interviews remotely in this way. And that enables me to make it very easy for someone like you to come on the show, but it also comes met a CEO of a very big company, and it's now a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees, and something like 99% of them work from home or work from a Starbucks. I mean, there's like 15 people in an office in San Francisco, and everyone else is elsewhere. So there's more to it than just the media streams we will emphasize here. I think you're making a great point that it's not emphasized enough in my book. And I learned it actually very concretely in the government, where sometimes if you're trying to

solve a problem and you're in one building and people are half an hour away, you send them an email and the email doesn't have the right tone or will not be read as having the right tone. And in any case, problem solving is harder if you're using text sometimes than if you're actually looking at someone's face. And a phone or something that involves voices of any technology, it can be better than email, as you're saying, because it's more personal. But I found in government and after, if you really want to solve a problem, often the best thing is to get a group of people in the room. And we decreasingly rely on that. And one reason it's good is that you

can understand different perspectives better if you see people's faces, and they'll understand yours. And another thing, so it softens some of the interactions. And another thing is that, and I don't know of data on this, but I bet there either is some or there will be some, that creativity grows because sparks fly. in an office or in a family even. If people are all talking to each other face-to-face, something new will come out that couldn't have been produced by email or even by phone. Yeah, and all the communication at that point isn't merely transactional in the way that it is when you're sending an email. I think this is just now a ubiquitous experience that everyone will be very familiar with, where you're having some communication that's growing increasingly fraught by email and if you're wise you will realize that the medium is very likely contributing to the problem. The tones are getting misread and everything is sounding sharper than

you intend or in fact you just become a slightly different person behind the keyboard. I mean, the maniac comes out a little bit, and your response to another person isn't being modulated by a face-to-face encounter, or even by being able to hear the humanity in their tone of voice on the phone. I'm sure other people have had this experience, but I've had exchanges with people by email that just either aren't working or they're just strangely unpleasant. And then you get on the phone with the person or you see them face to face, and there's this sort of shock of recognition that, oh, okay, this is that person, right? I mean, this person has a different shape in your experience than the shape they had acquired in the back and forth by email. And it does kind of break a spell, which was defining the communication and defining it almost invariably in an unproductive way. way. Completely. No, I think that's a deep point. And it has implications for a zillion different things, including political polarization. So I had a friend in the government with whom I was

frequently at odds on what to do. And she just developed a habit of saying, call me. So I write her an email and she's like, call me. And we became great friends. And in DC, you know, I was working for a democratic president. Um, and the Republicans were often not happy with what president Obama was doing. Um, but I learned so much from, uh, Republicans in the house and the Senate from face-to-face conversations where not seeing some email, they didn't write a lot of emails, but they would write a lot of letters, which would be harsh or accusatory or something, but they'd actually have often very good ideas. And when it's in person, then you're not fighting, are you bad? You're thinking, what's the best way to solve a problem? And that, what you're saying about, you know, human interactions, either in business or in

families or whatever, it's basically a national thing. So I was thinking as you were talking is the harsher or misread stuff that we all experience, in a way, our political process is facing that. And that's a challenge for, let's say, infrastructure. It's just a random problem. Right. But to be clear, you're not exactly nostalgic for some former time where you think communication was better across the board? You actually believe, I think you say this in the book, that things are just simply better now than they were in the past. It's a matter of fixing problems now, but there is no place you would point the Wayback Machine if you could. Completely. So if you ask me when was communications in America the best it's ever been,

I would say today. And if it's next week, probably next week's going to be a little better than today. Just because, you know, if you can talk to each other across, you know, very long distances, that's a huge improvement. And if you can learn stuff just at a click about something you care about that may really affect your life, that can be, you know, incalculably great. But one way to think of it is the cell phone is a fantastic advance. But if you're using it while you're driving, the chance of your being an accident is higher than it would be if you were using it when you were driving. And the technology is great, but to optimize, let's say, the benefits of its existence would be a good idea. And we're not nearly there yet with respect to social media.

Well, I want to talk about social media and how Twitter and Facebook have been behaving themselves. But before we get there, I think we should talk about the phenomenon of hyperpolarization in groups. And this is a general phenomenon that you describe in the book where like-minded people become more extreme

once they begin associating with one another. And this is, it may sound paradoxical on its face, but it really functions by dynamics that are fairly easy to understand. Perhaps you should explain, maybe the Colorado study is the place to start here, but talk about what happens in groups among the like-minded. Okay. So what we did in Colorado was to get a bunch of people in Boulder, which is a left of center, together to talk about climate change, affirmative action, and same-sex unions. We asked them for their views privately and anonymously. Then we had them discuss the issues together and come to a verdict. And then we asked them to record their views privately and anonymously.

And there was reason to expect that if you got a group of people together, they'd end up coming to the middle of what the group members privately thought, and that would be their verdict. And then they'd all be in the middle. But that's not what happened. They were kind of to the left on all three issues. They went way to the left on all three issues as a result of talking to each other. So the left of center people in Boulder had some diversity on climate change and affirmative action before they talked to each other. After they talked to each other, they were more extreme, they were more confident, and they were pretty well unified on all of those issues. This isn't just a left of center

phenomenon. We did the same thing in Colorado Springs, which is right of center. And as the people in Boulder went whoosh to the left, the people in Colorado Springs went whoosh to the right. And it's just because they were talking with like-minded others. So the basic rule is that usually people who are inclined in a certain direction end up, after talking to each other, thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk. And we can explain, I think, why sometimes in primaries, both of our political parties go left and go right has something to do with this. Why within cults, people end up sometimes getting all extreme. That's often the phenomenon of group

polarization, as it's called. Why terrorists often get radicalized, and also why people who, you know, do great things like attack extreme injustice, why they get radicalized, because they're all talking to each other. And you say that the mechanisms are pretty intuitive. I think you're completely right, that the leading one is if you have a group of people who think, let's say, that the minimum wage should be raised. That's what they tend to think. Some of them aren't sure. They're talking with each other. They'll hear a lot of arguments about why the minimum wage should be raised because that's what most of them think. And they won't hear a lot of the arguments the other way. And the arguments that

they hear will be kind of tentative as well as few. And then if they're listening to each other after they've heard all the arguments, they'll think, oh, minimum wage really should be raised a lot. And it's just because of the arguments they're hearing. And if you have a group of people who tend to think the minimum wage should not be raised, exactly the mirror image of what I've described will happen. be raised, exactly the mirror image of what I've described will happen. And I'm smiling as I talk because we actually taped our conversations in Colorado. And so I've seen them. And in real time, you can completely see the process where the people on the right are going more right because they're talking to people who think conservative thoughts, and the conservative thoughts are going to look numerous and excellent, and the disagreement will seem rare and kind of stupid. There's also this phenomenon of reputation management within the group, where you have

your concern for how you're appearing in this group that's now getting constellated around a consensus, and that will tend to filter out any expressions of doubt about this forming consensus, and it functions as a kind of attractor state for convergence. You're completely right. So in Boulder, our left-of-center groups, you can see them talking about climate change, whether the U.S. should sign an international agreement. And some of the people who are left of center were a little nervous about that. They thought, you know, I don't know what would happen to American sovereignty if we yielded to an international agreement. They just weren't sure. But you could see them looking at their fellow citizens of Boulder and thinking, oh man, if I say that,

I'm going to look really bad in their eyes. So I'm just going to agree with them. This strikes me as yet another argument against identity politics. Do you see a connection there? I think exactly right. Identity politics. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content,

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