New York City's
Social Psychology (10th Edition)
10th Edition
ISBN:9780134641287
Author:Elliot Aronson, Timothy D. Wilson, Robin M. Akert, Samuel R. Sommers
Publisher:Elliot Aronson, Timothy D. Wilson, Robin M. Akert, Samuel R. Sommers
Chapter1: Introducing Social Psychology
Section: Chapter Questions
Problem 1RQ1
Related questions
Question
Why has there been so much fuss about New York City's attempt to impose a soda
ban, or more precisely, a ban on large-size "sugary drinks"? After all, people can
still get as much soda as they want. This isn't Prohibition. It's just that getting it would take
slightly more effort. So, why is this such a big deal?
2 Obviously, it's not about soda. It's because such a ban suggests that sometimes we need to
be stopped from doing foolish stuff, and this has become, in contemporary American
politics, highly controversial, no matter how trivial the particular issue. (Large cups of soda
as symbols of human dignity? Really?)
Americans, even those who generally support government intervention in our daily lives,
have a reflexive response to being told what to do, and it's not a positive one. It's this
common desire to be left alone that prompted the Mississippi Legislature earlier this
month to pass a ban on bans—a law that forbids municipalities to place local restrictions on
food or drink.
We have a vision of ourselves as free, rational beings who are totally capable of making all
the decisions we need to in order to create a good life. Give us complete liberty, and
barring natural disasters, we'll end up where we want to be. It's a nice vision, one that
makes us feel proud of ourselves. But it's false. John Stuart Mill
wrote in 1859 that the only justifiable reason for interfering in someone's
freedom of action was to prevent harm to others. According to Mill's "harm principle," we
should almost never stop people from behavior that affects only themselves, because
people know best what they themselves want.
That "almost," though, is important. It's fair to stop us, Mill argued, when we are acting out
of ignorance and doing something we'll pretty definitely regret. You can stop someone
from crossing a bridge that is broken, he said, because you can be sure no one wants to
plummet into the river. Mill just didn't think this would happen very often. Mill was wrong about that, though. A lot of times we have a good idea of where we want to
go, but a really terrible idea of how to get there. It's well established by now that we often
don't think very clearly when it comes to choosing the best means to attain our ends. We
make errors. This has been the object of an enormous amount of study over the past few
decades, and what has been discovered is that we are all prone to identifiable and
predictable miscalculations.
Research by psychologists and behavioral economists, including the Nobel Prize-winner
Daniel Kahneman and his research partner Amos Tversky, identified a number of areas in
which we fairly dependably fail. They call such a tendency a "cognitive" bias," and there
are many of them—a lot of ways in which our own minds trip us up. For example, we suffer from an optimism bias, that is we tend to think that however likely a
bad thing is to happen to most people in our situation, it's less likely to happen to us—not
for any particular reason, but because we're irrationally optimistic. Because of our "present
bias," when we need to take a small, easy step to bring about some future good, we fail to
do it, not because we've decided it's a bad idea, but because we procrastinate.
We also suffer from a status quo bias, which makes us value what we've already got over
the alternatives, just because we've already got it-which might, of course, make us react
badly to new laws, even when they are really an improvement over what we've got. And
there are more. The crucial point is that in some situations it's just difficult for us to take in the relevant
information and choose accordingly. It's not quite the simple ignorance Mill was talking
about, but it turns out that our minds are more complicated than Mill imagined. Like the
guy about to step through the hole in the bridge, we need help.
Is it always a mistake when someone does something imprudent, when, in this case, a
person chooses to chug 32 ounces of soda? No. For some people, that's the right choice.
They don't care that much about their health, or they won't drink too many big sodas, or
they just really love having a lot of soda at once.
But laws have to be sensitive to the needs of the majority. That doesn't mean laws should
trample the rights of the minority, but that public benefit is a legitimate concern, even
when that may inconvenience some. So do these laws mean that some people will be kept from doing what they really want to
do? Probably—and yes, in many ways it hurts to be part of a society governed by laws,
given that laws aren't designed for each one of us individually. Some of us can drive safely
at 90 miles per hour, but we're bound by the same laws as the people who can't, because
individual speeding laws aren't practical. Giving up a little liberty is something we agree to
when we agree to live in a democratic society that is governed by laws.
The freedom to buy a really large soda, all in one cup, is something we stand to lose here.
For most people, given their desire for health, that results in a net gain. For some people,
yes, it's an absolute loss. It's just not much of a loss. Of course, what people fear is that this is just the beginning: today it's soda, tomorrow it's
the guy standing behind you making you eat your broccoli, floss your teeth, and watch PBS
NewsHour every day. What this ignores is that successful paternalistic laws are done on
the basis of a cost-benefit analysis: if it's too painful, it's not a good law. Making these
analyses is something the government has the resources to do, just as now it sets
automobile construction standards while considering both the need for affordability and
the desire for safety.
Do we care so much about our health that we want to be forced to go to aerobics every
day and give up all meat, sugar and salt? No. But in this case, it's some extra soda. Banning
a law on the grounds that it might lead to worse laws would mean we could have no laws
whatsoever. In the old days we used to blame people for acting imprudently, and say that since their
bad choices were their own fault, they deserved to suffer the consequences. Now we see
that these errors aren't a function of bad character, but of our shared cognitive inheritance.
The proper reaction is not blame, but an impulse to help one another.
That's what the government is supposed to do, help us get where we want to go. It's not
always worth it to intervene, but sometimes, where the costs are small and the benefit is
large, it is. That's why we have prescriptions for medicine. And that's why, as irritating as it
may initially feel, the soda regulation is a good idea. It's hard to give up the idea of
ourselves as completely rational. We feel as if we lose some dignity. But that's the way it is,
and there's no dignity in clinging to an illusion.
———————————————————
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