Cass Sunstein

An article by Cass Sunstein: How do you debunk a conspiracy theory? Suppose people think that Israel carried out the 9/11 attacks or that the moon landing was faked. Or that Koch money or Hillary Clinton or Pete Buttigieg was behind the Iowa caucus fiasco, or that the coronavirus comes from a fiendish plot by multinational corporations. Conspiracy theorists tend to be emotionally invested in their beliefs, meaning that if you contradict them, you might make them angry. And if you offer them evidence that they’re wrong, you might make them angrier still – and so strengthen their commitment to their belief. Social scientists have found that, in some contexts, corrections actually backfire. If, for example, people still think that the Affordable Care Act contains death panels, a correction can make those people even more certain that the law contains death panels. One reason is that when people are told they’re wrong, they are immediately put on the defensive, and they work hard to defend their beliefs. Another reason is pure suspicion: Why would anyone bother to deny it, if it isn’t true?

An article by Cass Sunstein: Former Solicitor General and federal judge Kenneth Starr made a simple argument this week on behalf of President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense. We are living in the “age of impeachment,” he said on Monday, urging the Senate to acquit Trump and “return to norms” that counsel against using impeachment as a political weapon. If Trump is removed from office, Starr was suggesting, every future president will be vulnerable, at least if the House of Representatives is controlled by the opposing political party, and if the Senate can be persuaded to go along. A president named Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren might well be exposed to a horrific impeachment battle, simply because of the Trump precedent.

What if it were President Barack Obama who was the subject of the Senate impeachment trial? How would we feel then? Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School, suggests a question along those lines in his book “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.” It’s one of several thought experiments that I suggest in order to step back from the hurly-burly in the Senate and interrogate our own principles and motivations. The first approach, as Sunstein puts it, is this: “Suppose that a president engages in certain actions that seem to you very, very bad. Suppose that you are tempted to think that he should be impeached. You should immediately ask yourself: Would I think the same thing if I loved the president’s policies, and thought that he was otherwise doing a splendid job?” Alternatively, if you oppose impeachment and removal, Sunstein suggests you ask yourself: “Would I think the same thing if I abhorred the president’s policies, and thought that he was otherwise doing a horrific job?” In practical terms, this amounts to: What if it were Obama who had been caught in this Ukraine scandal?

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Have you ever shopped online for something (say, a hotel room) and selected an option with an excellent price only to learn, at the time of checkout, that the price is much higher than originally advertised? That happens a lot. A key reason is that advertised prices often exclude taxes and fees. Even if there is some disclosure of that fact (“taxes and fees not included”), consumers might not pay attention. Having initially seen a reasonable price and settled on their choice, a lot of them just put in their credit card number even if, at the final stage, they are shocked to see the unexpectedly high cost. In these circumstances, new research suggests that disclosure regulation can do a lot of good.

When we live in an age of information, what information do we choose to absorb? And once we have absorbed information, which factors influence how we process it? Cass Sunstein ’78, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard, examines those questions in a study published this week in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour. The paper, “How people decide what they want to know,” was co-authored by Tali Sharot, a professor of cognitive neuroscience in the department of Experimental Psychology at University College London. ... Sunstein discussed his research with Harvard Law Today in an email interview that took place this week as he was en route to London.

An op-ed by Alister Martin and Cass R. Sunstein: What if long emergency room wait times, an unfortunate fact of life, could also be a key to increasing voter participation among traditionally underrepresented groups in our electorate? The demographic overlap between those who most use the ER for their health care and those who don’t vote presents a potential opportunity. In 2014, a US Census Bureau report found that nearly 1 in 4 Americans were not registered to vote. That’s over 51 million potential voting-age adults, or more than the entire population of Spain, who were not registered to vote in the United States.

An article by Cass Sunstein: Facebook says that it is banning “deepfakes,” those high-tech doctored videos and audios that are essentially indistinguishable from the real thing. That’s excellent news — an important step in the right direction. But the company didn’t go quite far enough, and important questions remain. Policing deepfakes isn’t simple. As Facebook pointed out in its announcement this week, media can be manipulated for benign reasons, for example to make video sharper and audio clearer. Some forms of manipulation are clearly meant as jokes, satires, parodies or political statements — as, for example, when a rock star or politician is depicted as a giant. That’s not Facebook’s concern.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Suppose that a nation, a company or an individual wants to give a lot of money to a university, a nonprofit group or an individual researcher. Suppose that many people think that the potential donor is morally abhorrent, or has done morally abhorrent things. Is it wrong to take the money?

An article by Cass Sunstein: Here’s what movie fans and insiders have been waiting for: the 2019 winners of the Behavioral Economics Oscars, known as the Becons. Isabelle Huppert, Daniel Day-Lewis, Ryan Gosling and Jessica Chastain – where would they be without a prestigious Becon? This year has been a spectacular one for movies, and the secretive Becons Award Committee (said, by some, to consist of just one person) has had to make some especially tough choices.

An article by Cass Sunstein: Senator McConnell, meet Alexander Hamilton. In the last weeks, a lot of people who followed the hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives became familiar with Hamilton's definition of an impeachable offense as "the abuse of violation of some public trust." But nearly everyone has neglected Hamilton's brisk, essential discussion of the obligations of the U.S. Senate in impeachment trials - a discussion that casts a bright light on what Republicans and Democrats are obliged to do. The date was March 7, 1788. The occasion was the Federalist Papers - specifically, No. 65.

An article by Cass Sunstein: Suppose that you believe (as I do) that President Donald Trump has abused his power and thus committed impeachable offenses. If so, you should take one concern very seriously: As the House of Representatives proceeds, there’s a risk that the nation will become the United States of Impeachment. Fortunately, the risk is diminished by the narrowness of the current text of the two articles of impeachment that were released on Tuesday. The first article focuses solely and narrowly on the effort to influence Ukraine to announce a criminal investigation of Joe Biden and of “a discredited theory promoted by Russia alleging that Ukraine – rather than Russia – interfered in the 2016 United States Presidential election.” The second article focuses solely and narrowly on obstruction of Congress through Trump’s categorical refusal to respond to its impeachment inquiry.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein; What if the U.S. already had a Green New Deal, and nobody noticed? Between 2009 and 2016, that’s exactly what happened. The U.S. government did a great deal to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Without a lot of fanfare, it restructured major components of the national economy in the process. Here are a few highlights: - The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation required both cars and trucks to become a lot more fuel-efficient. The greening of the fleet produced substantial cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions.

For another look at the story we've been covering all day. The House Judiciary Committee's first hearing on the impeachment inquiry. For more on what the law says about impeachment, we spoke to Cass Sunstein, Harvard Law Professor & Author of 'Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide'.

An article by Cass Sunstein: What if the U.S. already had a Green New Deal, and nobody noticed? Between 2009 and 2016, that’s exactly what happened. The U.S. government did a great deal to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Without a lot of fanfare, it restructured major components of the national economy in the process...A more ambitious step, going well beyond the first Green New Deal, would be to introduce new legislation calling for carbon taxes, the best and most efficient way to reduce carbon emissions. The political obstacles would be formidable, but such taxes – starting low and increasing over time – could be a major part of a legislative climate package in early 2021.

An article by Cass Sunstein: With the coming impeachment vote in the House and a possible trial in the Senate, the U.S. has reached a rare defining moment...In the Federalist No. 65, Hamilton explained that impeachment is designed for offenses proceeding “from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” That explanation was designed to assure We the People that their president, repository of the executive power, would not be a king.

An article by Cass Sunstein: Where do dogs come from? What is their relationship to wolves? Where do Homo sapiens come from? What is our relationship to other human species such as Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo erectus? Why do dogs flourish as wolves struggle to survive? Why are we the only remaining humans? New research suggests that these diverse questions have a single answer. In brief: Dogs are far less likely than wolves to respond to challenges with violence (or by running away). Or, in more technical terms, they show low levels of “reactive aggression” in social interactions. As compared to extinct human species, Homo sapiens show precisely the same thing. As a result, we — you and I — are uniquely capable of trust and cooperation. That’s the basis of our evolutionary triumph.

This week brought the first public hearings in the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. Next week, they will continue with many more witnesses set to testify. The hearings have been long – at times riveting, at times tedious — with partisan bickering on full display. They are also historic. It’s a rare thing for Congress to use this tool crafted by the framers to hold the president’s power in check. My guest, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, says that’s a good thing. Sunstein is the author of “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.” Diane spoke with Sunstein Friday morning as Marie Yovanovitch testified in Congress. She asked what our founding documents say should – and should not – be considered an impeachable offense.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: For all the rhetoric and theatrics, the first day of public impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives on Wednesday produced a surprising amount of light. Let’s put partisanship to one side and try to find that light, isolating the relevant issues of law and fact, and bracketing the question of whether Donald Trump is a terrific president or a terrible one. Everyone agrees that if Trump withheld U.S. military aid from Ukraine in order to encourage it to combat corruption in general, there would be no problem. At the same time, almost everyone seems to agree that Trump should be held to account if (1) he withheld the funds from Ukraine in order to get it to mount a baseless criminal investigation of a political rival, Joe Biden, or Biden’s son, Hunter, and (2) Ukraine did in fact launch that investigation.