5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The merits and dangers of consensus, June 8, 2009
This review is from: Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide (Hardcover)
The book starts with something we all know, that it is more pleasant to talk with people that agree with you than with those that disagree with you. What we do not realize is that by acting this way we become "polarized". As all agree with what we think we start to believe that what we think is true. The author Cass Sunstein does an excellent job to make you aware of this happening and the consequences.
An extreme example is terrorists that form groups with extreme polarization. Most of these terrorists have experienced moral outrage, personal experience of discrimination, economic exclusion, even though many are well educated and come from middle-class families.
Polarization can be bad but also good like overthrowing the Lenin Communist system in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, or abolishing slavery in the United States.
The author presents his view as to what can be done to avoid bad polarization and tolerate good polarization. He believes the only answer is free speech and tolerance; acceptance and respect for diverse views, for diversity. He points out that dictatorships are breeding grounds for terrorism. Polarized groups objecting to dictatorships do not trust what the dictatorships claim to be the truth. Discrimination and outrage do the rest.
It is also relevant for business. Leaders that act like dictators will before or after their death ruin the company. A board of directors must contain members with different perspectives that forcefully argue with each other and management. Also at the level of management vigorous arguments about different perspectives are essential. What the author omits is the importance that after vigorous argument in boards and management a decision taken must be supported 100% by all the members of the board and of top management.
The book also enriches your vocabulary and concepts with words like: conspiracy entrepreneur, interactive echo-chamber, first and second order diversity, enclave deliberation, public forum doctrine, informational cascade and more.
Finally the book gets off to a slow start but towards the end it becomes exciting to read.
The Leader's Way: Business, Buddhism and Happiness in an Interconnected World
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13 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent. The OIRA is going to be in excellent hands. Read why., May 23, 2009
This review is from: Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide (Hardcover)
Sunstein will soon run the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). This Agency conducts cost benefit analysis of regulations. So, it is interesting to know Sunstein mindset. Sunstein is also the coauthor of the excellent
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness where he fleshes out his political philosophy of Liberal Paternalism. After reading those two books, you get a feeling that the OIRA will be in extremely capable hands. Sunstein has a powerful and inquisitive intellect. He is also an excellent writer as his books are very easy to read despite covering rather dry topics.
Homogeneous groups polarize as they cause like-minded people to strengthen their positions by eliminating the balancing safeguard from diverging opinions. Sunstein demonstrates that no category individuals is exempt from this behavior. Even Federal judges were victim of it as their verdict were politically more polarized when they belonged to an homogeneous political panel (all three Judges from same political party) vs when they were not.
Regarding risk taking endeavors, if individuals are moderate risk avoiders after deliberating they will become more so. If they are moderate risk takers, the group will render them more extreme risk takers.
Group polarization occurs because individuals only exchange information that reinforces their initial views and exclude info that does not. Group polarization is stealthy. You join a group of like-minded people. You approve of what they say. Before you know it they turned you into an extremist.
The Bush Administration was an insular polarizing group. Independent views were not solicited. A better model is Abraham Lincoln "Team of Rivals" that Obama is emulating. Here independent minded experts are nominated to create an internal debate with a broad range of opinions. Similarly, well functioning corporate boards contain clashing viewpoints and challenging questions. These points are a tribute to the power of checks and balances including the value of creating Teams of Rivals even in domains in which leaders usually seek team players.
Local communities are subject to polarization as people cluster into areas of like-minded people and become adamant about our political views as depicted by Bill Bishop in
The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Similarly, corporations are polarizing groups where employees are exaggerating the positive outlook of their employers and are dismissive of competitors.
Group polarization can go terribly wrong. Sunstein explains the Rwanda genocide, the Holocaust, terrorism, Abu Ghraib abuses through group polarization leading to violent extremism. He refers to the social experiments of Milgram, where normal people gave others really high electric shocks just to answer questions. He also refers to Zimbardo Stanford Prison experiment where students were divided in two groups: guards and prisoners. The guards became so cruel, the experiment was aborted to preserve the welfare of the "prisoners." The underlying finding is that given circumstances moral people can do horrible things. This issue has triggered a debate between the "dispositionists" and the "situationists." The dispositionists believe cruelty is a matter of individual disposition. The situationists believe it is a matter of situation. This is a Nature vs Nurture argument. Milgram and Zimbardo experiments are red flags that normal people can become cruel. However, people did observe "good" guards that were not cruel in the Stanford Prison Experiment and Abu Ghraib. But, where these few saints exceptions that confirm the rule? To study this further, read Zimbardo's
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.
Sunstein also connects the dots between group polarization and Irving Janis
Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. The two concepts overlap. But, he states that group polarization better explains extremism (moving one's opinion towards an extreme) than groupthink. But, in many group decisions the two concepts are identical.
Sunstein indicates information cascades cause investment bubbles. Robert Shiller calls them social contagion; whereby we start believing something because everybody else does. In the late 90s, we thought the sky was the limit for Internet stocks. See Shiller
Irrational Exuberance. Just three years later we jumped into the next information cascade: home prices always go up. See Shiller
The Subprime Solution: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It.
Information cascades also entail peer pressure. He calls those reputational cascades. You are afraid to hold a diverging opinion from the consensus so as to not become socially ostracized. He uses the global warming view that it will produce catastrophic harm in the very near term as an example. Such a reputational cascade was typefied by Al Gore's
An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. Bjorn Lomborg wrote a balanced rebuttal
Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (Vintage). But, the rhetorical debate was over before it began. Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth' became a worldwide reputational cascade recompensing Gore with a Nobel Price and an Oscar Award. Meanwhile, Bjorn Lomborg remained in obscurity outside of Denmark.
Sunstein covers terrorism in depth. He refers to the excellent work of Krueger in
What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism (New Edition) indicating that terrorists are not who we think. They are well educated often middle class and not mentally ill. But, they often live in societies that lack civil rights and liberties. And, terrorism becomes a last resort form of political protest for the ones who are inclined to violence (the disposisionist argument resurfaces). Group polarization within terrorist groups plays a huge role. Per Sunstein terrorists are not born, they are normal individuals who become polarized.
To prevent group polarization, Sunstein promotes free flow of information so that a group checks its position against external references, conducting cost-benefit analysis. Group diversity is also key so diverging opinions are expressed.
Sunstein explains the
The Wisdom of Crowds with the Condercet Jury theorem. Groups generate better overall decisions than individuals so long as the Majority rule is used and each person is more likely than not to be correct. If either of those conditions are not met than group decisions are worst than individuals.
Dictatorships are less successful than democracies in war because democracies have better access to information. Careful studies show that democracies do well in fighting wars in part because they do not start wars if they are not likely to win them.
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