By their innocence and goodness, by their boundless capacity for forgiveness, and by the sheer power of their faith and hope, children redeem their parents, bringing out their best selves.
In psychology and behavioral economics, people have shown that if you just describe options in a certain way, or make some features of a situation salient, you can get people to do and even see what you want. You don't have to be a Jedi to manipulate people's attention.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the power of framing and attention manipulation in influencing people's decisions and perceptions.
Cass Sunstein emphasizes how the way options are presented can significantly impact human behavior and decision-making. By manipulating the context or highlighting certain features, one can steer individuals toward specific choices without the need for coercion or overt persuasion, much like a Jedi would use mind tricks. This reflects a fundamental principle in psychology and behavioral economics regarding how context and attention shape our understanding and actions.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a marketing presentation to showcase a product's benefits, you might use this quote to explain how product features can be highlighted for better customer engagement.
More from Cass Sunstein
All quotes →If a company has acted badly, people want to punish it - not in order to deter future misconduct, but simply because they're outraged. And the more outraged they are, the more punishment they want to inflict.
If you look at a great city, one of its amazing features is that you're going to find all sorts of things that you might not specifically have chosen in advance. And they will change your day. Maybe your month. Maybe your whole life.
It can be easy and tempting, especially during a presidential campaign, to listen only to opinions that mirror and fortify one's own. That's not ideal, because it eliminates learning and makes it impossible for people to understand what they dismiss as 'the other side.'
Research shows that if people are talking and listening to like-minded others, they become more dogmatic, more unified, and more extreme. Personalized Facebook experiences are a breeding ground for misunderstanding and miscommunication across political lines and, ultimately, for extremism.
If the air quality is terrible in Los Angeles, if a particular university is unusually expensive, if crime is on the rise in Dallas, or if a company has a lot of recalled toys, transparency can spur change. Whenever public or private institutions have to answer to the public, their performance is likely to improve.
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We teach people that they upset themselves. We can't change the past, so we change how people are thinking, feeling and behaving today.