Afternoon everyone. Good afternoon. My name is michael barone, im a resident fellow at the American Enterprise institute and its my pleasure today to welcome to aei professor Cass Sunstein. Hes the University Professor at harvard law school. He formerly was professor of law and Political Science at the university of chicago for many years. He was the administrator of the office of information and Regulatory Affairs commonly known as oi from 2009 two 2012 in the obama administration. He has written more than a dozen books and im happy to say that he has a number of times at aei and we consider him a good friend of aei. And easier today to talk about his latest book which is called republic. I think that a reader would not have pronounced the word that way 20 years ago but its an important and interesting book so please welcome Cass Sunstein to aei. [applause] is a drill to be back here. You all do amazing work and ive learned so much from whats produced here, legal and regulatory matters and i really you on the half of billions of people who you never will meet and read what you produce. Ill tell you the origins, the unlikely origins of this book. I was last or first for the last several years to live in the waldorf towers, which is pretty heady stuff for a country boy from massachusetts and i lived there because my wife, samantha powers, ambassador to the United Nations and thats where the ambassador has lived. For the first few months, the people at the waldorf towers would greet me in the morning and evening by saying hello mister power, good evening mister power, how are you mister power. And that was fine except that one of them had become quite a good friend after several months in the sense that i knew him and talk to him every day and it was a little awkward that he was calling by a name other than my own so i said to him after a few months of some embarrassment, that its Cass Sunstein, you can call me Mister Sunstein as you choose but my name is Cass Sunstein and he looked at me with incredulity and he said thats unbelievable. He said thats amazing. You look exactly like mister power. [laughter] and that was intriguing to me in the sense that he was not an irrational person. He was updating basically his beliefs based on the new information and he believed it was more likely that there were two people who looked exactly the same Walking Around his building and that the ambassadors husband had a different name her. And given his prior beliefs, that was not irrational. It turned out to be wrong but it was not irrational. Okay, heres the United States of america in many respects today where people are serving their correctness and the falsehoods emanating from the other side. This has implications not only for our capacity to handle problems that cut across peoples ideology but also it affects people and how they think about one another, so much so that there is a phenomenon, partyism which isnt as ugly as racism but in some respects is larger. The number of people who would be unhappy if their child married someone of the opposing Political Party is higher than the percentage of people who would be unhappy if their childmarried someone of a different race. Im amazed by this finding a few years ago, tried to find out weather would be people would be more unhappy if someone married someone of a different Political Party than of the same sex, were not there yet but we are getting there. Which suggests that the intensity of partyism is growing rapidly and as of 2017, its immensely higher than it was a couple days, a couple years ago, probably a couple days ago to but a couple decades ago when people basically didnt care if their child married someone of a different Political Party and this is showing up in other measures of animus, so that people actually discriminate in Employment Decisions against people whose Political Party is different from their own. Here are some issues where partyism is causing problems. Whatever you think should be done about infrastructure, chances are good that something should be done about infrastructure and the intensity of disagreement between republicans and democrats is relatively modest on that issue and yet nothings happened yet. Eight you nf is technical talk for authorizations for the use of military force. To get an authorization for the use of military force in areas where the level of consensus across immigrants and republicans is high is really difficult. With respect to immigration and judges, we could have much more agreement than we are observing , the Nuclear Option taken by the democrats first and now the republicans is testimony to the difficulty of moving beyond Party Affiliation as a way of producing generally agreeable rental results. In washington, my job in washington, i noticed in some meetings with people of a Political Party that i will not name a fairly sharp disagreement between their privately expressed moderation and their publicly expressed moderation, and i should just say i served that between both Political Parties with a kindof ointment plea , that it was the case that our privately expressed moderation if publicly expressed would not cost us our jobs. And the extent to which people complaining of that risk were also complaining of the effect of social media on their capacity to retain their jobs if they expressed moderation. That was very, it is very visible to them. Im going to tell you about three empirical studies which are not involving the internet precisely but which are replicating, i think in an experimental setting what is happening every hour of every day on twitter and facebook. The first experiment comes from colorado and the idea was to get people from boulder which is left of center together to discuss Climate Change, affirmative action and samesex unions and to get people from Colorado Springs which is right of center to do exactly the same thing and we did a reality check to make sure our Colorado Springs participants were right of center and are boulder people were left of center and not amazingly, they were. What we did was to record their anonymous views privately, have been deliberate together to a public verdict on these issues and then to record their anonymous views privatelyafter they talked with one another. What interested me as one of three authors of the project was only one question how their views shift in their anonymous predeliberation statements to their anonymous post deliberation statements . What would those discussions do to how they thought about the three issues when they were recording their judgments in a way that no one would ever see except the experimenters . Heres what happened. Three things. People in Colorado Springs got more unified than they were before they started to talk. Before they started to talk, there were some people in Colorado Springs who thought im kind of worried about Climate Change, maybe we should have an international agreement. Not after the discussion. There were people in boulder who thought affirmative action has some problems. I think its a form of race discrimination. There is some diversity in boulder springs. After they talked briefly, that diversity was crushed. In their private, anonymous statements, the second thing that happened was they got more confident. The people in Colorado Springs of samesex union, some of them were sure they didnt like them so much but they were cured. After they talked, they were sure. The third thing that happened and the most disturbing and i think illuminating is they got more extreme. In both sides. People in Colorado Springs were to the right. The people in boulder were to the left but they were like, here. This range. After our little experiment, they were here. They were operating in different political universes and their private, anonymous views. What i just described, a very artificial experiment, thats what social media constructs. A capacity to create the functional equivalent of our experimental groups. Why did this happen . Ive seen the tapes of the discussion. We could roll the tapes if you wanted and heres what you would see in real time. First, in Colorado Springs, the place where they started kind of skeptical about a Climate Change treaty and in the end, a very, very skeptical, the number of arguments in their discussion that supported the International Treaty were few. Thats not amazing, thats a statistical inevitability. The number of arguments that opposed an International Treaty were numerous, also an inevitability given the initial distribution ofviews. If people are listening to one another and human beings typically do, they would end up more skeptical about the treaty after they heard the various arguments. And in boulder, exactly the same thing happens in the mirror. That is, on affirmative action some people didnt like it very much, most people like it plenty. The arguments that supported it crushed the arguments that undermine it and people thought oh gosh, most of the arguments are supportive of it. That produced confidence, unity, extremism. The second thing is slightly more subtle and you could see this in real time and each of us can see this in our daily lives, whether the issue involves what products to buy, what people do like or what political view to hold on an issue. Heres the phenomenon. Most people who dont have a ton of information tend toward the middle. They become tentative because of humility. When they view as corroborated by members of the human species, the humility diminishes, they become confident and more extreme. So confidence increases by corroboration and you can see that in both cities and corroboration makes for more intensity of commitment to the view. And that helps account for the finding. The third involves reputation. Peopledont want , in a group of people who tend to think say affirmative action is great, they dont want to look like a racist or idiots in front of each other so they end up saying i think like affirmative action plenty, even if they privately didnt 10 minutes before and then in their private, anonymous statement of view it would be very awkward to say what they said publicly, they dont actually believe. So their private view lines up with their public view. Heres the second of the three studies and this does not involve professors or think tank people trying to constructsomething. This involves the world. And it benefits the study from a serendipitous fact which is on threejudge panels of the United States, court of appeals panels, the possible composition is reagan, reagan, bush appointees, obama, obama, equipment appointees. Obama, reagan appointees and bush, bush, clinton appointees meeting three are appointees, 3d appointees, to the ny are appointees, to ours and won the appointee and thats it, thats all they can be possible. Heres the headline finding. While the Political Party of the appointing president is a pretty good predictor of how a judge is going to vote in an ideologically contested case, not fantastic but pretty good. The Political Party of the two other judges of the president who appointed the two judges on the panel is at least as good and often a better predictorof how that judge is going to vote. Got it . You want to know how judge x is going to vote . Dont ask whether obama or trump appointed judge x. Do ask whether obama or trump appointed the other two judge sitting. Heres the most dramatic finding. While in the aggregate data theres about a 13 Percentage Points different and the likelihood of a real liberal vote between an r and d appointee, roughly 13 Percentage Points which is concerning not catastrophic from the point of view of the rule of law, the likelihood of a liberal vote on a dvd panel is frequently 30 to 40 percent higher than the likelihood of a liberal vote from a judge on in our rr panel. That is to say a the judge on the panel is phenomenally liberal voting patterns and in our judge on and our panel shows phenomenally conservative voting panels with a phenomenal mean just compared to how they vote in aggregate. What makes that a startling finding in my view is that a d on the d d r panel, the ds have the votes. It involves whether the epas regulation is lawful, they can do what they want. Theyve got the votes. Why is it that the ds on d d r patterns show more diversity . I think itsabout information, at least in part. What are they hearing . Ad , thats boulder. And are on and r panel, thats Colorado Springs and what makes the statistics not expected is that what we are observing is legal professionals, judges who learned it in the law answering not a political question but a legal question and even so, the selection through random draw into Something Like an information cocoon produces systematically more extreme results. The data i told you i think actually understates the magnitude of the phenomenon. We justcollected votes , my we i mean a team of law students who if theyre not in mental institutions now, im very relieved because counting many thousands of votes, thats not fun. They did it nonetheless. What i didnt ask them to do because its much harder is to explore the relative extremism of the opinions, rather than just the up or down vote so were asking did a woman when in a sex discrimination case, did an epa regulation get upheld or not . Thats what were asking. Were not asking whats the reasoning because theres every reason to think on a d d d panel, what was the technical law professor term if youre unfamiliar with that. For omg, okay. Okay. Heres one other story of updating, you heard the waldorf story which is explanatory of some of what happened in colorado. The other story about dating comes from star wars and i did a little book on star wars so i researched star wars and there was a debate between, forgive me, do you think you would hear something about star wars . This seems very surprising or terrible, one star wars story. The debate was between Lawrence Kasdan, a Great American screenwriter and george lucas on killing the main characters in return of the jedi and Lawrence Kasdan said youve got to kill Luke Skywalker and george lucas, lucas, luke. He said luke isnt going to die. Then kasdan says leah, leah has to die and george lucas says leah is not going to die, you dont go around killing people and say we will kill yoda. He says im not going to kill yoda, he died on the way but comes back and kasdan gets kind of, in his sole he gets real and he gives a speech about art. And hes saying im saying the movie has more emotional weight of someone you love is lost along the way. The journey has more impact. Taking about culture and art and lucas says very quickly, one sentence. I dont like that and i dont believe that. Now, notice the beautiful architecture of the sentence. Not liking proceeds and probably helps account for not believing. The waldorf story, my friend didnt particularly dislike the idea that i had a different name from my wife. He didnt believe it, it just seemed that couldnt be true. Here its about theemotional commitment proceeding the belief. Okay. Heres the last study. How goodlooking do you think you are on a scale of 1 to 10 . If you would, think about it. I have some news for you. Thats you. Okay. Now what do you think, having heard my news for you . Lets do a second experiment, asked the same question, how goodlooking do you think you are . I have news for you, thats you. Okay, heres what the data suggests. That people are asymmetrical updaters in the sense that good news has a much bigger impact than bad news. If people estimate that they are a six on the scale and then some credible outsider says you are actually an eight, they say im a seven or eight, ive learned. If they say theyre a six and a credible outsider says im a four, they say thats not true, im a six. People believe the good news, not the bad news. If this is true for many personal things with respect to the risk of having diabetes, insomnia, infertility, being vandalized, being trapped in an elevator, having a mouse or rat in your house, that sounds a little like doctor seuss, apologies for that. The Information Processing regularity is good news people will update more reliably with then bad news. Bad news, they will say thats noise. Good news they will say oh, okay. So we know there is an asymmetry and it turns out to have neurological foundations. Theres an identifiable part of the brain that blocks updating with respect to bad news and if you zap it, then the good news bad news effect disappears. What i was interested in and am interested in is how this works for political information. Heres what we did. We got initial studies which i will tell you about, this has been replicated with more people. We got 300 americans, recruited them and sorted them intothree groups based on their answers to questions about the environment. Strong Climate Change believers, weak Climate Change believers and moderate Climate Change believers, creative names for our three sons and the data we got is not surprising in terms of their anticipated warming. Strong believers think by 2100 we will go to 6. 3 degrees fahrenheit, the moderat