NBER Working Papers by Cass Sunstein

When members of deliberating groups speak with one another, their predeliberation tendencies often become exacerbated as their views become more extreme. The resulting phenomenon -- group polarization -- has been observed in many settings, and it bears on the actions of juries, administrative tribunals, corporate boards, and other institutions. Polarization can result from rational Bayesian updating by group members, but in many contexts, this rational interpretation of polarization seems implausible. We argue that people are better seen as Credulous Bayesians, who insufficiently adjust for idiosyncratic features of particular environments and put excessive weight on the statements of others where there are 1) common sources of information; 2) highly unrepresentative group membership; 3)...

In many settings, human beings are boundedly rational. A distinctive and insufficiently explored legal response to bounded rationality is to attempt to "debias through law," by steering people in more rational directions. In many important domains, existing legal analyses emphasize the alternative approach of insulating outcomes from the effects of boundedly rational behavior, often through blocking private choices. In fact, however, a large number of actual and imaginable legal strategies are efforts to engage in the very different approach of debiasing through law by reducing or even eliminating people's boundedly rational behavior. In important contexts, these efforts to debias through law can avoid the costs and inefficiencies associated with regulatory approaches that take bounded rat...