News media that caters to individual interests is harmful to a functional American democracy, said Cass R. Sunstein on Tuesday, speaking at the University’s sixteenth annual Hugo L. Black Lecture on Freedom of Expression. Sunstein incorporated psychology and politics in a discussion of “Public Forums: The Affirmative Side of Free Speech.”
Sunstein said to attendees in Memorial Chapel that news media sources have an ethical obligation to present both news and opinion pieces that the public does not necessarily want to see. News sources, he argued, that present only those stories and viewpoints with which the audience finds agreement enhance bias, insulating audience members from opposition.
“When we experimented with group bias we found that those of a given political bent became more extreme in their views after deliberating with others who agreed with them,” Sunstein said. “In Boulder, Colo. we polled a group of liberals before and after they met as a group to discuss key issues—gay marriage and global warming and the like—and found that they became more liberal after talking with other liberals about their views.”
In Colorado Springs, Sunstein found the same results with a group of conservatives. He argued that this “deliberation effect” promoted extremity and bias, reducing diversity in the process.
“Deliberation squelched diversity in the groups we examined,” Sunstein said. “When we asked participants a month after the study to take the same poll again, they still rated themselves as holding opinions that were stronger than those they held at the beginning of the study. Even after they had been long separated from the group, they still held more extreme views.”
Shea Dwyer ’10, attending the lecture for extra credit in a psychology course, expressed agreement with Sunstein, He cited similarities between his words and material from the University course, including the work of twentieth-century social psychologist Solomon Asch.
“He talked about Asch’s experiments with conformity, which our teacher had just showed us,” Dwyer said. “The subject watches a small point of light moving along a wall and has to guess how far it moved, guessing on average about eight inches. Then a few new people come in, and everyone except the subject guesses the light moved only two inches. Asch found that the subject almost always changed his response, which fits with Sunstein’s argument that groups of like-minded people won’t think for themselves as much.”
Laurenellen McCann ’09 found similar cohesion between Sunstein’s words and material from a University government course.
“Groups tend to incite competition, because people want to be the most extreme,” McCann said. “Extremity signals power. When people get together to talk about politics, no one wants to be seen as the moderate.”
Sunstein then segued into a broader discussion about freedom of speech, touching on Hugo L. Black’s legacy as a Supreme Court justice. An influential democrat and U.S. senator to Alabama from 1926 to 1937, Black then served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court for 37 years. Black, Sunstein said, was a First Amendment “literalist,” a man who believed that the U.S. government had authority to censor its citizens only in very extreme cases. He contended that Black’s view has come to dominate American political thought, resulting in courts that favor free speech over censorship in almost all cases.
“We’ve come a long way in attaining the freedom we need,” Sunstein said. “Now we just need to protect it.”
Sunstein is The Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago School of Law and author of more than twenty books on constitutional law and political science.
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