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MISFEARING: A REPLY
by Cass R. Sunstein [ Full Text ] |
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119 Harv. L. Rev. 1110 (2006) |
| For several decades, social scientists have investigated bounded rationality and its relationship to human behavior. In processing information, people use identifiable heuristics, which can produce severe and systematic errors. When people use the availability heuristic, for example, they answer questions of probability by asking whether examples readily come to mind. In assessing the risk of crime or certain methods of travel, people are affected by their ability to recall instances in which the risk materialized. In addition, human beings do not follow expected utility theory. Most importantly, they dislike losses more than they like corresponding gains, and in that sense they show loss aversion. As a result of various forms of bounded rationality, human beings are prone to what might be called “misfearing”: they fear things that are not dangerous, and they do not fear things that impose serious risks.
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| An understanding of bounded rationality has obvious implications for law and policy. Much of the time, private fears are translated into public action. No one doubts that democratic nations should respond to the public will, but there is reason for real concern if small problems
receive significant attention and resources, and if large problems receive little or none. In Laws of Fear, I attempt to show how bounded rationality contributes to private and public blunders, and to outline an approach to risk reduction that might improve people’s lives by making them, among other things, healthier and longer.
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| In emphasizing the relationship between culture and risk perceptions, KSBG are onto something important. But there are serious problems with the claim that risk perceptions are generally a product of people’s worldviews. More fundamentally, what they call “cultural cognition” should not be seen as a competitor to approaches based on bounded rationality. To be sure, some normative positions are deeply entrenched, and people with entrenched normative positions often read facts in a way that conforms to their predispositions. Biased information-processing of this kind — what might be termed normative bias — is a distinctive form of bounded rationality, one that certainly affects risk perception. KSBG are best read to contend that normative bias plays a significant role in assessments of certain risks, and this claim is an important supplement to existing work on risk perception.
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| I argue, in short, that insofar as it produces factual judgments, “cultural cognition” is largely a result of bounded rationality, not an alternative to it. I also argue that while it is undemocratic for officials to neglect people’s values, it is hardly undemocratic for them to ignore people’s errors of fact.
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My purpose in this Reply is to elaborate these claims, but let me begin with two clarifications. First, KSBG refer to “irrational weighers,” a term that seems to me misleading. People should be regarded as boundedly rational weighers, not as irrational ones. Those who use heuristics are hardly irrational; they are adopting simple rules of thumb that generally work well. Second, KSBG describe their own approach as “cultural cognition,” but I wonder about this term as well. Is the United States best understood as divided into different “cultures”? It seems more plausible to say that people have different normative positions, and those positions bias their judgments on questions of fact. Sometimes those normative positions are “clustered,” to use KSBG’s terminology, and these clusters have important biasing effects that reflect bounded rationality. But to say this is to get ahead of the story. [ More ]
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Replies in the Harvard Law Review Forum |
Cultural Evaluations of Risk: "Values" or "Blunders"?
by Dan M. Kahan & Paul Slovic |
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