#Republic by Cass R Sunstein

Author:Cass R Sunstein [Sunstein, Cass R]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691175515
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

PREFERENCE FORMATION

These points about online attention and distraction—sometimes through cheerleading—have much broader implications, because they tell us something about how preferences are formed (or deformed). If people are exposed mostly to sensationalistic coverage of the lives of movie stars, only to sports, or only to left-of-center views and never to international issues, their preferences will develop accordingly. If people are mostly watching a conservative station—say, Fox News—or if their Twitter feed consists of conservative views, they will inevitably be affected by what they see. If people are mostly exposed to material that celebrates the current government—whether it is China, Cuba, France, or the United States—their preferences might well be changed as a result. Whatever one’s political views, there is, in an important respect, a problem from the standpoint of freedom itself. This is so even if people are voluntarily choosing the limited fare.

The general idea here—that preferences and beliefs are a product of existing institutions and practices, and that the result can be a form of unfreedom, one of the most serious of all—is hardly new. It is a long-standing theme in political and legal thought. Thus Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the effects of the institution of slavery on the desires of many slaves themselves that “plunged in this abyss of wretchedness, the Negro hardly notices his ill fortune; he was reduced to slavery by violence, and the habit of servitude has given him the thoughts and ambitions of a slave; he admires his tyrants even more than he hates them and finds his joy and pride in servile imitation of his oppressors.”9

In the same vein, Dewey wrote that “social conditions may restrict, distort, and almost prevent the development of individuality.” He insisted that we should therefore “take an active interest in the working of social institutions that have a bearing, positive or negative, upon the growth of individuals.” For Dewey, a just society “is as much interested in the positive construction of favorable institutions, legal, political, and economic, as it is in the work of removing abuses and overt oppressions.”10 Robert Frank and Philip Cook have urged that in the communications market, existing “financial incentives strongly favor sensational, lurid and formulaic offerings,” and that the resulting structure of rewards “is especially troubling in light of evidence that, beginning in infancy and continuing through life, the things we see and read profoundly alter the kinds of people we become.”11

On social media, something very much like this happens every day. You may or may not be what you eat, but you can turn into what you read. If you read snark, you might well become snark. At least some people who read materials that promote terrorism will become terrorists. If you join an echo chamber, or turn your Facebook page into one, you might well end up changing your own values and even your own character.

Every tyrant knows that it is important and sometimes possible not only to constrain people’s actions but also to manipulate their desires, partly by making

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