Sunstein on Outrage

Cass R. Sunstein (Harvard Law School; Harvard University – Harvard Kennedy School (HKS)) has posted Growing Outrage (Forthcoming, Behavioural Public Policy) on SSRN.  Here is the abstract: Why and when does outrage grow? This essay explores two potential answers. The first points to a revision or weakening of social norms, which leads people to express outrage that they had previously suppressed. The second points to a revision or weakening of social norms, which leads people to express outrage that they had not previously felt (and may or may not now feel). The intensity of outrage is often a product of what is most salient. It is also a product of “normalization”; people compare apparently outrageous behavior to behavior falling in the same category in which it is observed, and do not compare it to other cases, which leads to predictable incoherence in judgments. These points bear on the #MeToo movement of 2017 and 2018 and the rise and fall (and…

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