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.
Cass SunsteinRead
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
ManipulationAttentionFramingPsychologyDecision Making
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.
Cass SunsteinRead
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.
Cass SunsteinRead
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.'
Cass SunsteinRead
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.
Cass SunsteinRead
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.
Cass SunsteinRead
Similar quotes
Though many schizophrenics become curiously attached to their delusions, the fading of the nondelusional world puts them in loneliness beyond all reckoning, a fixed residence on a noxious private planet they can never leave, and where they can receive no visitors.
Andrew SolomonRead
It may be true in the case of autism that if you start off with a deficit in terms of empathy or mind reading, you've just got more time to devote to understanding the world by systemizing.
Simon Baron-CohenRead
Language and words for psychopaths are only word deep; there is no emotional colouring behind it. A psychopath can use a word like, ‘I love you’ but it means nothing more to him than if he said, ‘I’ll have a cup of coffee.
Robert D. HareRead
Sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.
Jon RonsonRead
More and more research is suggesting that, far from being simply encoded in the genes, much of personality is a flexible and dynamic thing that changes over the life span and is shaped by experience.
Carol S. DweckRead
Neurotic behavior is quite predictable. Healthy behavior is unpredictable.
Carl RogersRead