Cass R. Sunstein

Bio: Cass R. Sunstein is an academic researcher from Harvard University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Supreme court & Constitution. The author has an hindex of 117, co-authored 787 publications receiving 57639 citations. Previous affiliations of Cass R. Sunstein include Brigham Young University & Indiana University.

Sexual Orientation and the Constitution: A Note on the Relationship between Due Process and Equal Protection

Abstract: In Bowers v Hardwick,1 the Supreme Court held that the due process clause does not protect the right to engage in homosexual sodomy. The Court said that heightened judicial protection under that clause was reserved to rights "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" or "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition."2 According to the Court, homosexual sodomy could not qualify for special protection under either test.3 In some circles, Hardwick was thought to spell the end, at least for the immediate future, to efforts to use constitutional litigation to prevent government from imposing sanctions on the basis of sexual orientation. In Padula v Webster,4 for example, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the FBI's policy of considering homosexual conduct a "significant" and often dispositive factor in employment decisions. The court said that the issue was controlled by Hardwick:

If People Would Be Outraged by Their Rulings, Should Judges Care?

Abstract: At first glance, it is puzzling to suggest that courts should care whether the public would be outraged by their decisions; judicial anticipation of public outrage and its effects seems incompatible with judicial independence. Nonetheless, judges might be affected by the prospect of outrage for both consequentialist and epistemic reasons. If a judicial ruling would undermine the cause it is meant to promote or impose serious social harms, judges have reason to hesitate on consequentialist grounds. The prospect of public outrage might also suggest that the Court’s ruling would be incorrect on the merits; if most people disagree with the Court’s decision, perhaps the Court is wrong. Those who adopt a method on consequentialist grounds are more likely to want to consider outrage than are those who adopt an interpretive method on nonconsequentialist grounds (including some originalists). The epistemic argument for attention to outrage is greatly weakened if people suffer from a systematic bias or if the public view is a product of an informational, moral, or legal cascade. There is also a strong argument for banning consideration of the effects of public outrage on ruleconsequentialist grounds. Judges might be poorly suited to make the relevant inquiries, and consideration of outrage might produce undue timidity. These points have general implications for those who favor “popular constitutionalism,” or judicial restraint, on democratic grounds. An understanding of the consequentialist and epistemic grounds for judicial attention to public outrage also offers lessons for the decisions of other public officials, including presidents, governors, and mayors, who might be inclined to make decisions that will produce public outrage.

Why They Hate Us: The Role of Social Dynamics

Abstract: I. THE THESIS My goal in this brief Essay is to cast some new light on a question that has been much discussed in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11. The question is simple: Why do they hate us? I suggest that a large part of the answer lies, not in anything particular to Islam, to religion, or even to the ravings of Osama bin Laden, but in social dynamics and especially in the process of group polarization. (1) When group polarization is at work, like-minded people, engaged in discussion with one another, move toward extreme positions. The effect is especially strong with people who are already quite extreme; such people can move in literally dangerous directions. It is unfortunate but true that leaders of terrorist organizations show a working knowledge of group polarization. They sharply discipline what is said. They attempt to inculcate a shared sense of humiliation, which breeds rage, and group solidarity, which prepares the way for movement toward further extremes and hence for violent acts. They attempt to ensure that recruits speak mostly to people who are already predisposed in the preferred direction. They produce a cult-like atmosphere. With an understanding of group polarization, we can see that when "they hate us," it is often because of social processes that have been self-consciously created and manipulated by terrorist leaders. These social processes could easily be otherwise. If they were, terrorism would not exist, or at least it would be greatly weakened and its prospects would be diminished. There is no natural predisposition toward terrorism, even among the most disaffected people in the poorest nations. When terrorism occurs, it is typically a result of emphatically social pressures (2) and indeed easily identifiable mechanisms of interaction. More broadly, ethnic identification and ethnic conflict are a product of similar pressures; (3) an understanding of "why they hate us" is thus likely to promote an increased understanding of social hatred in general. We can draw some conclusions here for the law of conspiracy, for freedom of association, for the idea of "political correctness," for the system of checks and balances, and for possible responses to terrorist threats. Thus I shall identify the distinctive logic behind the special punishment of conspiracy: those who conspire are likely to move one another in more extreme and hence more dangerous directions. I shall also urge that freedom of association helps to fuel group polarization--a healthy phenomenon much of the time, but a potentially dangerous one in some contexts. I shall urge, finally, that an especially effective way to prevent terrorism is to prevent "terrorist entrepreneurs" from creating special enclaves of like-minded or potentially like-minded people. It might seem tempting to object to such efforts on the ground that they interfere with associational liberty, which is of course prized in all democratic nations. But we are speaking here of terrorism and conspiracy to kill American citizens; in such cases, the claims for associational liberty are very weak. Conspiracy is the dark side of freedom of association, and it is a form of conspiracy that I am discussing here. One of my largest goals is thus to provide a window on the nature and consequences of conspiracy in the particular context of terrorism. II. THE BASIC PHENOMENON A. What Groups Do Let us begin with some social science research that seems very far afield from the area of terrorism. In 1962, J.A.F. Stoner, an enterprising graduate student, attempted to examine the relationship between individual judgments and group judgments. (4) He did so against a background belief that groups tended to move toward the middle of their members' pre-deliberation views. Stoner proceeded by asking people a range of questions involving risk-taking behavior. People were asked, for example, whether someone should choose a safe or risky play in the last seconds of a football game; whether someone should invest money in a low-return, high-security stock or instead a high-return, lower security stock; whether someone should choose a high prestige graduate program in which a number of people fail to graduate or a lower prestige school from which everyone graduates. …

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Abstract: Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

The behaviour change wheel: a new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions.

Abstract: Improving the design and implementation of evidence-based practice depends on successful behaviour change interventions. This requires an appropriate method for characterising interventions and linking them to an analysis of the targeted behaviour. There exists a plethora of frameworks of behaviour change interventions, but it is not clear how well they serve this purpose. This paper evaluates these frameworks, and develops and evaluates a new framework aimed at overcoming their limitations. A systematic search of electronic databases and consultation with behaviour change experts were used to identify frameworks of behaviour change interventions. These were evaluated according to three criteria: comprehensiveness, coherence, and a clear link to an overarching model of behaviour. A new framework was developed to meet these criteria. The reliability with which it could be applied was examined in two domains of behaviour change: tobacco control and obesity. Nineteen frameworks were identified covering nine intervention functions and seven policy categories that could enable those interventions. None of the frameworks reviewed covered the full range of intervention functions or policies, and only a minority met the criteria of coherence or linkage to a model of behaviour. At the centre of a proposed new framework is a 'behaviour system' involving three essential conditions: capability, opportunity, and motivation (what we term the 'COM-B system'). This forms the hub of a 'behaviour change wheel' (BCW) around which are positioned the nine intervention functions aimed at addressing deficits in one or more of these conditions; around this are placed seven categories of policy that could enable those interventions to occur. The BCW was used reliably to characterise interventions within the English Department of Health's 2010 tobacco control strategy and the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence's guidance on reducing obesity. Interventions and policies to change behaviour can be usefully characterised by means of a BCW comprising: a 'behaviour system' at the hub, encircled by intervention functions and then by policy categories. Research is needed to establish how far the BCW can lead to more efficient design of effective interventions.

International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

Abstract: Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

Risk as Feelings

Abstract: Virtually all current theories of choice under risk or uncertainty are cognitive and consequentialist. They assume that people assess the desirability and likelihood of possible outcomes of choice alternatives and integrate this information through some type of expectation-based calculus to arrive at decision. The authors propose an alternative theoretical perspective, the risk-as-feelings hypothesis, that highlights the role of affect experienced at the moment of decision making. Drawing on research from clinical, physiological, and other subfield of psychology, they show that emotional reactions to risky situations often drive behavior. The risk-as-feelings hypothesis is shown to explain a wide range of phenomena that have resisted interpretation in cognitive-consequentialist terms.

A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality.

Abstract: Early studies of intuitive judgment and decision making conducted with the late Amos Tversky are reviewed in the context of two related concepts: an analysis of accessibility, the ease with which thoughts come to mind; a distinction between effortless intuition and deliberate reasoning. Intuitive thoughts, like percepts, are highly accessible. Determinants and consequences of accessibility help explain the central results of prospect theory, framing effects, the heuristic process of attribute substitution, and the characteristic biases that result from the substitution of nonextensional for extensional attributes. Variations in the accessibility of rules explain the occasional corrections of intuitive judgments. The study of biases is compatible with a view of intuitive thinking and decision making as generally skilled and successful.