Cass Sunstein ’78 (left) is the director of the new Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy.
Experts explore how interactive media can sway decision-making
Scholars and social-media experts convened at Harvard Law School Feb. 6 to examine the ways in which electronic interactive media can sway human decision-making and behavior.
The event, “Social Media and Behavioral Economics Conference,” was sponsored by the law school’s new Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy and created by the program’s director, Cass Sunstein ’78, who recently returned to HLS following three years as administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget.
While serving in the OMB, Sunstein was known for trying to make the federal regulatory system “as sensible as possible” by applying cost-benefit analyses and assessments of human behavior to his reviews of proposed governmental rules.
Elliot Schrage ’86, vice president of communications and public policy at Facebook, pointed out how rapidly the influence of social media has come about. He said that when he joined Facebook five years ago, it was seen as “this silly tool where people would poke each other and throw sheep. I distinctly remember being part of conversations where we would say, ‘We think these technologies of connection, not just Facebook, are creating a revolution.’ And people would laugh.”
But after revelations of social media’s role in the creation of the Arab Spring two years ago, he noted, nobody takes social media lightly.
Since then, he said, social media have proved to be successful in a variety of ways, including the improvement of communication between individuals and groups and the achievement of public-health goals.
One of the most dramatic public-health initiatives driven by social media has been a Facebook program launched last spring that has prompted 500,000 people to register as organ donors. Sarah Feinberg, Facebook’s director of corporate communications, and Andy Cameron, the surgical director of liver transplantation at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, described the program and the reasons for its success. They pointed out that existing methods for getting people to sign up as organ donors, typically incorporated as opt-ins during visits to Departments of Motor Vehicles, have not been very successful. According to Cameron, 117,000 individuals currently need organs in order to survive, and many will die because of a lack of donors.
“If you register to become an organ donor and then share that on Facebook, it creates a news feed that your friends are seeing,” resulting in peer influence for friends to do likewise, Feinberg said.
Others pointed out how government might take cues from such successes and consider using social media for improving its service to the public.
Mike Luca, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, reported on his own research involving Yelp.com, a consumer-review website which he said is attracting 84 million unique visitors per quarter and which has begun a program in five cities to allow those municipalities to export restaurant health scores directly into Yelp’s database.
This provides a service to readers and a business boost to restaurants with good scores, but Luca said it also offers an opportunity for health inspection offices to utilize the information on Yelp to better guide deployment of health inspectors.
HLS Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95—a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society—said there’s evidence now that what people thought was undiluted “peer-to-peer” social media information is being altered by institutions with an interest in influencing how people think. He pointed to the example of Zappos, the online shoe dealer, which employs the Amazon Mechanical Turk Web “crowdsourcing” engine to fix the grammar and spelling of consumer reviews on its website on the premise that better-written reviews, even if they are negative, result in greater sales.
Zittrain said he wasn’t ready to pass judgment on that kind of activity.
However, he added, if institutions are intermediating in ways that cast doubt on veracity, “then I think we absolutely have to think about a framework for how to account for that.”
Questions about governmental response to the rapid ascent of social media were raised repeatedly throughout the conference. As Sunstein noted during one panel discussion, the complicated questions are yet to be answered about the rules that are yet to be developed about privacy protections for individuals on one hand and free information flows on the other.
“Insufficiently considered judgments of the trade-off between those two might compromise something that democratic societies hold dear,” he said.
Cass Sunstein ’78 (left) and Nancy-Ann DeParle ’83 (right)
Designing pathways through the curriculum
Law and Government Program of Study connects coursework to the work of practicing attorneys
The Law and Government Program of Study hosted a spring kickoff on Feb. 12, featuring Cass Sunstein ’78, former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget, and current Lecturer on Law Nancy-Ann DeParle ’83, who recently served as White House deputy chief of staff for policy.