How to Humble a Wingnut and Other Lessons from Behavioral Economics

Chicago Shorts

by Cass R. Sunstein

In How to Humble a Wingnut, leading constitutional scholar, behavioral economist, and former Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Cass R. Sunstein examines the unconventional impetuses behind human decision-making. Why it is that people often choose to behave so strangely? Sunstein’s incisive commentaries point to recent empirical findings to demonstrate how and why people convince themselves they are right despite evidence to the contrary; fear dangers they are unlikely to encounter; and ignore real risks. Mining developments in recent behavioral studies for tips on everything from holiday shopping and political biases to staying healthy and clear thinking in general, Sunstein nudges his reader towards that rarest of grounds—understanding.

Genres: Economics, Politics, Nonfiction

45 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 13, 2013

About the author

Cass R. Sunstein is an American legal scholar, particularly in the fields of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and law and behavioral economics, who currently is the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration. For 27 years, Sunstein taught at the University of Chicago Law School, where he continues to teach as the Harry Kalven Visiting Professor. Sunstein is currently Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he is on leave while working in the Obama administration.

Reviews

[Koenfucius · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short collection of Sunstein's Bloomberg View columns. As is to be expected of a bundle of brief essays produced with near-weekly regularity, the quality is perhaps a bit uneven. However, don't let that put you off: the large majority contains genuinely interesting behavioural insights, which Sunstein manages to find in numerous real-life situations.

People like Cass Sunstein do society a great favour by bridging the sometimes way too wide gap between academia and the real world: they manage to lift the essence from sometimes impenetrable research papers, map it onto a context that everyone can recognize, and write about it in thoroughly readable and engaging prose.

[Robert P. Hoffman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of short essays that Sunstein wrote form Bloomberg. He does raise interesting points but some of it reads as though he is trying to write a self-help book: follow these principles and you will be better at giving gifts and influencing people.

The articles do have some insightful points. Here are some of the ones that I found to be quite good.

(1) He talks about how when people are rating a song that the rating can be influenced by the number of people who downloaded the song. The more people who download the song the higher the rating. He applies this to voting. If you are told that your friends on Facebook have voted you are more likely to vote.

(2) The best article in the collection is How to Humble a Wingnut. Sunstein talks about studies that show that if you ask someone to state a position and how confident they are about the correctness of their position and then ask them to give reasons to support their position that the process of justifying one's position causes people to become less confident in the correctness of their position. I think this has applications as to how we approach topics in classes.

[Jason Furman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very short collection of Sunstein's Bloomberg Views columns (he calls them "essays"), they generally focus on behavioral economics and the formation of opinion, with an emphasis on how groups reinforce each others views and ways in which information can or cannot help--the answer being that more information even if contrary gets rejected and strengthens an extremist worldview, while asking people to explain why they think what they do they become more humble and less extreme (asking them to justify their view does not work, need to focus on explaining). Also the columns have some of the more familiar behavioral economics around, for example, defaults. And all of it is catchily written and well tied to various current events and cultural phenomenon rather than just being abstract. A good short introduction to these topics.