words" with cass sunstein former administrator the white house office of information and regulatory affairs in the obama administration and co-author of "wiser: getting beyond groupthink to make groups smarter." he shares his thoughts on the group decision-making can be flawed and offers ways to make better collective decision to keep discusses his book with susan cain, author of the bestseller "quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking." >> host: so i love this book. it was fascinating. and i would love if it's about that grapples with complex ideas so can we start with laying out the basic thesis? >> guest: it has two parts. the first is why do groups fail and the second is how can groups

be better. on failure there's been about 30 years of work on individuals of how we sometimes make mistakes so we might make investment errors, we might make tears in her choice of consumer products. we might make errors in what we're scared of and what we are not scared of. there's also been a burgeoning bit of research that has been really pulled together on how groups either aggravate or reduce the problems of individuals. that is a huge improvement over the idea of groupthink which is the popular consciousness do. groupthink means that groups often suppress the individual ideas and creativity of their members. that is a real problem. but to figure out what actually lies behind groupthink one of the specifics that make it happen, that's something where we really have made a lot of progress in the last decades. the book tries to figure out for ways that groupthink so to speak

actually happens in firms and families, in governments and religious organizations and labor unions and student organizations, anytime groups don't disagree. and then there's an idea we've learned a lot at the same time we learned why groups fail about how groups can succeed. some of it is through simple things you can institute in a minute, and others through more complicated things that require technologies. >> host: i want to get into where the places groups go wrong and how can we fix them. before we do that what drove you to write this book works to give personal experiences with your life that make you think -- >> guest: i will tell you what started. i was involved in a project involving juries and why did juries award damages x. window to get big and what do they do little? with a couple of perfect co-authors we did a large study

of theories and we found was that it's not the case which is what we expected that we have a group of six people, they will end up after deliberating arriving at an award that's in the middle of what the group of six thought. that's what we expected that you come up in the average or any meeting of a group of six. we found this very large jury study, group of the jurors end up with higher of words, often much higher awards than the average or middle member. in terms of dollars, juries have more punitive than individuals. we measured how bad they thought misconduct was on a numerical scale up zero to six something like that. if the average individual was a five, then the jury came in at six. outraged people got more outraged. people who wanted to punish corporations with $100,000 awards before they started to talk him after they talked they moved up to 200,000.

as i saw that, that's kind of astounded that groups end up much more outraged than individual or composer. what's going on? that's what made you think there's something we need to learn about. >> host: that is fascinating. was happening inside the jury rooms? are they taking each other on? >> guest: i think what's happening is two things. one is if your group of people who are outraged about conduct -- miscounted by corporation, the number of arguments they will fear that's just the corporationcorporation is terrible or the award should be higher is high. and the number of arguments they will do that suggests the company didn't do so bad or the award should be lower will be relatively low. so the fact they start outraged you can take about this a bad anything, if you're outraged about the united states is doing something that you think is harming you or general motors is doing something that you think is bad, or the president

of the president's opponent. if a group is inclined to think that, then the number of arguments pushed in that direction in the group a behind done the argument the other way. i saw some tapes and you did see it happening in real time. so it's about information exchange in a group that has a tendency towards outraged in these cases, and we can talk about a groups of multiple kinds, whatever the initial tendency is it can be amplified especially by people who were speaking out and are disturbed. the other thing i think as is interesting, has to do with status and reputation. if you're in a group who thinks what a corporation did is really bad and you think it's not so bad, one of our cases, the companies sold something that was a failed ultimate secure and while i at the time and continue to think that's really outrageous, a failed baldness cure, the standard person might

think that's not that terrible, it's not like anybody is going to die but in some of the baldness cure failed cases the jury did start out outraged. people who were not so outraged you could see them silencing themselves because they didn't want to look like passive people. they didn't want to look like weak people. they didn't look like there excuses when engaged in misconduct. it wasn't what your link to one another. they wanted to preserve their status for their self conception even within that group. so as people receive ma they're receiving away from the group norm and that can be bad because it deprives the group of important information. when the jury cases, whether they should be getting higher or lower awards, it's not easy to know in the abstract but if a group is composed of individuals who are silencing themselves because they're concerned about

reputation of status within the group, then the problem of the group is losing information. as soon as i saw that in our studies i thought, gosh, that's about juries but that's a ground groups generally also. so what would happen in a firm? doesn't happen within a family, that information is lost because people are afraid their their reputation is a risk or because people think i have something to contribute but probably not as good as with the other people are contribute in. >> host: so that affect the silencing, it's making me think of neuroscientific research. i've read when somebody dissents from a group they experienced the part of the brain that reacts to pain, to fear, but the experts with site is called the pain of independence. talking about that entry context, can you talk about an example you gave of this happening in a political

context? >> guest: so when president kennedy gave the go ahead to invade cuba, the bay of pigs he had anonymity among his advisers but you said afterwards it was a terrible failure internationally, very damaging event for the united states where we had to concede in a negotiation with cuba. that was not good. he said how could i have been so stupid to let them go ahead? kennedy said. and the reason was that his advisers were engaged in something a lot like our jury determinations. that is they were going with the flow in the realm and so they are were advisers after the fact is that i knew this was a mistake, but i didn't say anything. the reason was either they thought for some of them i'm sure that their own dissident views were probably wrong because they felt isolated, and the other one, then put which is

your point about the part of the brain that registers fear and anxiety, that if you say something and a group of people that dedicated to doing something purpose of national security or liberation, if you say maybe this is a good idea, probably are thinking to his uncle and locally bred in front of my peers, i put myself at risk. >> host: shouldn't it be the job of the leader of the group to do something about that dynamic? and i want to just point out utah go into book that i found fascinating which is we hear so much about the power of miss him in general. the power of optimism to achieve come help you achieve success of all kinds. you said can you divide the world into anxious and complacent people and you say when groups do well it's often because they have anxious leaders. talk about that. >> guest: this is something i saw in the white house day after day. there's one leader the president of the united states,

but there are also cabinet heads and heads of policy offices in the white house. if a leader is anxious, not in the sense that they are terrified of life but in a in the sense that they're constantly thinking what can go wrong, what is the problem that i might be reading about in the paper tomorrow? what is the way the american people might be adversely affected what i'm doing? that's great, and the reason it's great is because it's like a seatbelt or safety belt safety valve of the nation has by virtue of that level of anxiety. if by contrast of someone who's complacent and those people can often be really winning charismatic, there's a tendency often i think in the corporate world and in governments to engage in happy talk when you're talking to the boss. because you don't want to put on the boss' shoulders more weight. they have enough to worry about. everything is going great. we've got it.

been that can be a much easier exchange often and if you say we've got some real problems here and we are not sure how to sort them out. a boss might think, solve your problem. i have a bunch of my own. so the complacent person is often going to look more like a team player and often more like a person who has everything under control. the anxious person or the anxious leader i think shouldn't be full of woe and despair, but should be thinking all the time there are seven things or more that could go wrong and what are we doing to reduce the risk for each of the seven. >> host: do you think that groups should be composed of a mix of complacent and anxious people or is it rather than each individual member should have a little bit of both in their character? >> guest: great question. the data doesn't get refined enough to answer that question.

i will speculate based on experience. for a leader to have a degree of anxiety, i think it's absolutely indispensable. not the way it translates to an anxious workplace but in a sense that the leader is basically a sense of well being and is going to be okay is also thinking this might go wrong, that we have a plan let's say to launch a product and it might not work for the following sorts of reasons, are we investigating that, or a public official let's say who is developing some environmental program are to be thinking, is this going to have an adverse effect on small business, what can we do to cover that? is this going to adverse effect on economic growth? do we have the timing right? questions like that. so for leaders to be thing about downsides basically everyday is really good, so long as it doesn't swallow them up your which can be demoralizing.

within a group there's probably some importance in distinguishing among stages. so if the stages of i.t. development, to have a bunch of optimistic people saying same let's try this let's try that, try that, try that, they can be kind of let's put a lot of things on the table or on the board where optimism and deflation are opposites, and you want to have the stage optimism. at the time you are refining which plans to undertake, then to switch from the optimism everything is welcome to looking at downsides is probably a good idea. it is true that for an engineer, a creative person, a constructor of something, whether it's in art or politics or science you have to put on hold your anxiety about how things are going to work out, or a writer or a

scientist. year to think this is going to work but to have at key stages even for multiple team members a sense of how things can go wrong, that's helpful. i can say for my own experience in the white house i had a staff of about 50 and they were all excellent. i wanted every one of them to be thinking. i had an office that dealt with regulation but i wanted him to be thinking all the time, could go wrong with the project that they were helping to oversee. just so that wouldn't be mistakes that hurt the american people. i didn't want them having any week of these with you that everything was going great. if they did they probably were imposing risk on some people. >> host: i'm fascinated because it runs so counter to the american ideal, at least on its face. when you dig deeper i see get. so digging deeper in two leaders, it seems clear that if

you're the leader of a group you want to get the best of everyone in that group come in that meeting. and yet you say that it's very unusual for leaders to create a climate where that happens. why is that? is it simply because leaders tend to be too optimistic? are there other forces going on? >> guest: on the anxiety complacency scale it's important to emphasize that a kind of yes, we can headline that's good. so for a religious organization that's trying to grow into a people or a charity or a nonprofit, to think that this is going to work that's probably an indispensable foundation. at the same time that you're thinking what can go wrong. in terms of leaders here's the risk. if a leader indicates a firm view at the outset that this is risks number one, that can

squelch the creativity and innovation as well as the mix verdict that you want of your group. so if you had the leader who is superb but who also is declared early on that can be very bad in terms of a listening information. so one of our most successful presidents whether you like his politics or not as franklin delano roosevelt, and he was famous for giving everyone inside his own government a sense that he agreed with them early on, even if they had quite of opposing views. so some of his advisers were stunned that roosevelt indicated recently with a few actually thought they were full of nonsense to the opposing view was right. the reason he did was he wanted to be a good manager who we give everyone room to give their own ideas and develop them.

so he would see all of them. so one way a good leader can overcome the creativity and innovation squelching character of stating if you is not to state a few. so to be very quiet so to speak, at the outset and to be eliciting views was a sense of sympathetic curiosity. in government i answered some of the best people are really great at that. they didn't give people a sense that they were stupid. they didn't give people a sense that they were on the wrong tracks, until the time of decision when they would not say their stupid but they would say again we're going to go another way. so i will tell you a story that president obama. there was an early meeting involving what to do about the american car companies, and famously to help them and things are going well and he made the right decision. at the end of one of those meetings, the youngest person in the room, the person with the

lowest status at the very end of an hour-long meeting made a comment that didn't go to the core of the issue but went to an important subsidiary issue, and he mixed up the letters that were forming some government term. so instead of mgp he said pgm, something like that. a mangled of everyone in the room laughed. then people started to walk out. the hour was up on the ground that that was a funny mistake he made to the poor guy was their reaction to put the present said was weight, let him make his point. the reason that was terrific was not the obvious one which is it was a kind as to the person who was young and most -- but the person who was young and low status was really smart. if that person had something today to say, whether or not that got the letters right they

had an idea and the person wanted everyone in the room to you the idea. that is i think good leadership. it wasn't clear by the way the president was going to agree or not. >> host: he just wanted to know what it was. >> guest: so good leaders often think silence is golden. that's very simple to implement. >> host: so if you are the leader and you you are going to banks outcome you want your others views but you also know that the person who speaks earliest or one of the earliest chance to have a lot of influence with their opinions. who do you give the floor to first? >> guest: that's great, and that does suggest a keen importance of leaders thinking of that. well if the leader is pretty clear early on and justifiably clear on what the right course of action is then there are two smart things you can do. they are very different. one is to pick the person you

think states the correct view. that will as you say and could the discussion at a certain place and create what you think are stippling for good reason is probably right without having a squelching effect with the leaders saying it and by creating a kind of strawman for the rest of the group to target. that can be a smart strategy. it has a risk which the leader knows that i myself am infallible, i am directing a person who shares mine fallible belief to start that could be squelching. so a creative alternative is to pick the person who you think is both able and wrong, and let him talk first. so i've seen in government and the private sector sometimes the second strategy be used by good managers who deliberately select the person they think is on the

wrong track. not because they will say something silly but they will say something that all things considered isn't correct. to make sure that you is highlighted and gets the full airing. it's unlike what roosevelt did in sometime signaling his agreement with positions that he actually thought were entirely wrong. another thing of beauty can do by the way, doesn't involve sequencing is to do formally or less formally something that involves assigning roles to people. one thing i found government that initially i found very jarring was they would be differences, there are as they were forever the parts of the government that have different institutional responsibilities. so the environmental protection agency are concerned about the private. the department of agriculture is focused on farmers. that's what they're interested. the department of transportation

is focused on the transportation sector. sometimes there is a government term, one of the dozens of kind of jargon, called equities which doesn't have its the most sense the fairness but it means the environmental protection agency will have its equities meaning environment and the department of transportation will have its equity, the transportation sector. >> host: almost the concept of stakeholders? >> guest: yes you're initially seemed to me that was not helpful because you want anyone thinking what's best but it's actually really productive in a group supposing that everyone gets to talk. because if the group leader is doing the business right, people with the different roles feeling entirely free to say what they know, so that the department of agriculture people will think we are talking about the interests of farmers and they will emphasize those any meeting. they won't think i'm going to

shut up because, let's say, the department of energy has of you about energy. we are talking about farmers. that's what we know. the environmental protection agency even if it's own view doesn't capture the entirety of the public interest they have important equity so to speak which is where the effects on clean air and clean water. and the beauty of that and this is kind of unique animal, the federal government, but the beauty of it is after the discussion ends, the range of informational inputs that the room gets is a very wide. and if people haven't been identified as you are this department, that department that probably wouldn't happen. so what of you can do that is less formal than that indicates, you know, i know you have these expertise is, you have this expertise, probably better english, your this expertise and your this perspective and yet

this interest. i really want to do that. that is a very informal kind of almost immediately sign the. if the leader of science people different roles, the issue is about a product launch, for example, you're an engineer, you are a communications person, give someone who's involved with some sort of scientific issue, someone is a technology type, then all that information will get out which would be less likely if the group members were just thought to be members of the team. >> host: that's because psychologically they have been given almost permission to talk about a specific topic, write? >> guest: as you say, two things that begin in the jury which is also preserved by the way among citizens about political issues. we can talk about that if you'd like. the two problems are the people are often silent because they i think if other people think something is different, their own views must be wrong. or they think other people

thinking something different then they risk the reputation. if there is role assignment both of those are taken away because you think i know something that the others don't know. my boss thinks i do. and you think it's not inappropriate for me to say that well, from the standpoint of science or engineering or communications or farming here's a point of view. you're not risking your self. host mac that makes perfect sense but i'm also thinking in addition to the psychological freedom of your advocate on behalf of someone else to give people ask her power to really weigh in, you can imagine that happening in a jury thinking about the person you're speaking for instead of your standing within the room. that makes me think of something you wrote about devil's advocate. i would've thought a sunny some of the role of devil's advocate within the meeting would really

open up the dialogue because you're giving somebody the freedom to give a dissenting point of view to use it doesn't always work as well as you think. >> guest: this is something i agree that the intuition is that it's pretty good at the notion of a devil's advocate is in common conversation now. the problem is that it sold it of an exercise on reality. so if, let's say, there's a group of people who are debating what kind of investment to make and you were saying you're going to invest in energy or health and then say, well, we are not sure. let someone's be devil's advocate. then they do it. they are going through the motions in a group that already has an inclination. it's not real. so the appointment of a devil's advocate, unlike the appointment of a defender, of the legal system where you're just playing the role of a lawyer, here it's a group member who was

playacting. >> host: right. everyone else is for real. >> guest: so the devil's advocate in a way does his or her job best if he or she fails meaning in a group that's determined or inclined to do something, if the devil's advocate is the sign, make the other argument. and less it is structured very carefully, the devil's advocate if he or she succeeds is undermining the whole project. now if the structure of the devils advocacy arrangement is such that undermined the whole project in the end is an achievement, a devil's advocate did what was thwarted, that's good. then it's better and then the devil's advocate did something a little different which is called a red team. so a red team which is used in the u.s. military, in the intelligence community, law firms sometimes do it it's much

more real than the devil's advocate. it's not appoint someone who is part of your group to undertake your group narrative to argue the other way. that can be a fake. the red team idea is to get really a dedicated group. they can be small one of two people, people whose job it is to show vulnerabilities, show what could go wrong, show what will go wrong. the line between the devil's advocate which is dependent paper exercise and the red team isn't set in stone. the difference is the red team is often independent-ish people who have a mission and if they succeed in undermining the plan of the group that's what they are therefore. the red team idea works really well. i used it and form in government in the sense that if we were embarking on something, let's say it was a regulation designed to make sure the trucks would be

safer on the highway, and you want to do that, if the benefits justify the cost if it's something that's going to be expensive and not very protective for people and probably not a great idea. we asked people what are to devise the strongest arguments the other way. that would be done anyway that was more red team, figure out where we are vulnerable innocents and we're going off in the wrong direction. it wouldn't be in the nature of devil's advocacy. if you think about it in your own mind a single human brain sometimes when you're thinking about a course of action, we kind of know where we want to go on vacation, who we want to date, what job would want to take. and we might do a devils advocacy exercise in our head but it's not real. we know what we want to do. or you can decide in your own

head, red team yourself by thinking i'm going to put in brackets the question of the ultimate course of action, and i'm going to put the strongest argument i can do myself against that vacation or that job. and that's more like red teaming. i can work postfix of the regime doesn't depend on the fact that it is a team in any way. you can be a red person. it sounds similar to a story told in the book about the intel chairman changing his course of action based on specific thought exercise. can you talk about that? >> guest: the window is a very successful company having problems, and the leadership was struggling a lot. one of the top people said suppose we just started the company. we just entered our current jobs today. what would we do?

instead of having our history. if today was our first day what would we do? the new guy taking over. what would we do then? that's a great question, and for them it was completely eliminating -- the product that they've been selling that they've been profiting greatly from had run into trouble in terms of their own economic situation. if we were taking over the company we would stop selling. we would do something else, and that's what they did. i think the brilliance of that idea which managers and people in positions of mid-level or high level authority infrequently as is if i started in march of this week or today how would i do things differently? the reason that's great is it's a little bit like the idea of role assignment on steroids. you're assigning yourself a role of i'm doing this now i don't

have a history to which i have an emotional or some other kind of commitment. at the university of chicago, there was a faculty member there, excellent person and professor who in response to any new idea would say either, we did that or we never did that. and of those two responses exhausted the universe, so any new idea was bad. that if he had thought i just joined the university, what you think about? they would look at the view on the merits rather than looking through a goddess of the past. >> host: actually interesting. why is it that you say that if you take an investment club of tightly knit people who know each other really well, they're not going to do as well as an investment club of people who were not so well-connected? >> guest: this is very striking and surprising data. the our investment clubs all over the united states.

people get together and figure out how to invest. the worst performing investment clubs in the united states are the ones where people who really know each other, like each other, socialize, have dinner together have wine together. they are buddies. the best performing ones are the ones that have the degree of distance. people don't know each other that will personally. they are there to talk things through. the mechanism, it's a lot like juries. if you know each other well and you socialize together then the likelihood he will say to your buddy, the course of action we have embarked on over the last week is nonsensical. so they suppress dissent and disagreement. i think it's important for assessing group performance. it's related, by the way people have different personality types who was going to be helpful or not.

kind of a parallel to the investment club that i think it'sisa surprising finding, that the close-knit ones are successful. the distant ones succeed. data suggesting the most successful companies in the united states have contentious boards where people are arguing and fighting to what's good about that, it's not that they're and civil, they are eliciting information. if you have a good board you will have some able people there who know stuff. jon stewart milne had this great little book on liberty. he said one reason to have freedom of speech is that you can test truth. even if you're really sure, there's some chance you don't have it right. corporate board that has smart people that is a little i cower close-knit investment clubs, they're not going to get their truth tested. >> host: it's interesting to because you could see going the other way. you could say people who knew each other really well will feel like they have the freedom to

dissent because they know their colleagues will still love them when they are done. >> guest: a great point. what i'm wondering given what you just said is one there are some investment clubs in the united states, or some corporate boards in the united states, which combine great knowledge of one another with a high degree of personal fondness with and openness to dissenting views. the data i described is course, meaning its aggregate data close-knit. but you could disaggregate by looking at close-knit ones were lots of disagreement is allowed because there's trust. so it's comparable i think within a family or certain workplaces top of a set of our textbook places to work well they probably like that whether close-knit in terms of commendationcommonmission and they

may have lunch together, even dinner. but to say you are full of nonsense is completely acceptable because it's not socially destructive. you consider someone with whom you have a close relationship, you are full of nonsense and that's charming rather than the end of matters post a especially if you have created a culture where everyone cares about critical -- >> guest: great point. here's some experiments about close associate with what you are describing. there are experiments or whether people will cooperate under circumstances in which come in their economic interest to cooperate. if you call the name wall street but if you call begin cooperation, they cooperate. just the name of the game. so it's a great point that if you have a workplace where the norm is one of expressing your

own view if you think the company is going in the wrong direction. i.a. know there's some television programs by the way where creative activity is essential and collaboration is indispensable. where issues which are describing. this is anecdotal, scientific good anecdotes about television programs where there's high degree of trust the website was to investment problem data can what people do know each other they kind of love each other but they feel completely free to say that's a terrible idea. >> host: if you were sitting down tomorrow have been launched over the leader of the company or the leader of a new product line, and the leader tells you okay, we've meetings every monday morning but i think people feel inhibited and they're not telling what they think. what should they do differently?

>> guest: i think there are a few things to do. one is to give clarity that what it means to be a team player. it's not to be someone who is agreeable, but instead to get a sense that a team player is one who tells the group information they need to know. so to create a culture of information is absolutely essential. i think that would be number one. number two, to have a leader who is as we've discussed a little recess at the beginning, not in the sense of being not warm, but in the sense of saying i really not sure i want to everything and having that be sincere is possible. a third thing to do is to see if you can consistent with the structure of an institution to have good assignment of roles of people such that people feel that they have something to

contribute because they are given a distinctive task. these are very informal things. a fourth thing you can do is think of the hiring stage of two different kinds of people you want in your operation, first and is, you want people who are smart at the relevant task to general intelligence, not amazingly as a good predictor of performance. there's some work suggesting there's a different form of team capacity you might call it that's even better than general intelligence. it doesn't really have a need to sometimes called factor see, which means the ability to work in groups. these are groups that are genuinely collaborative groups rather than groups which have people working on their own. factor c refers to three things actually. one is the ability to read other

people's emotions. this can be tested independently through facial expressions, you know what they are. that is a good predictor of team performance. groups that have lots of people participating in one way or another versus ones that are small minority's participating and you can have -- >> host: how many people are speaking in the group transferred if you have a group of five speaking to me understood in different ways. it is in assuming they are talking in a meeting. they might be sending an e-mail. they might be communicating their ideas some other way. making sure they get what they know. and the third is women are a bit better than men at factor c the data suggest women just are on average a bit better than men at could she became a better team performance. we don't know whether that's because women are just independently better at reading other people's emotions, which

is apparently also true or whether there's something else that is going on there. but those are three things that tend to be hopeful. so for the good manager to have people who have a certain team capacity is will people have a certain ability. we need to know is the manager exact? what's the task? there some tasks that could have collaboration, after some task where it's not so important where people can work on their own. at least at central stages. then there's some other separate coordinating functions. so if it's people working separately, then to have just super people who are terrifically creative like steve jobs thought that people like that, that's good. the information aggregation of the sort i'm not describing is centrally important to let them do their great work and then let

them bring that to the rest of the group at the relevant time and it will be incorporated properly. >> host: i'm glad you're making that distention because there are so many people who i've run across over the years who prefer to spend their workdays working alone but they want their work to serve the good of the group. can you just tease out that distinction a little more between wonderworking, about what working in a group actually means? it's not only about sitting down at a table full of people and intriguing at that moment. >> guest: it. okay, you could have someone whose job it is for example, to invent something, and let's think of that very probably. it could be a commodity. it could be a text. it could be a visual product, and it could be that what they

need to do is to bring their commodity, their product to the group's attention at a moment for the groups evaluation and incorporation. they are group members in the sense, let's suppose there are a lot of people producing the thing and there's a component. for some people they may be producing a cover of the book, for example, or they might be producing the core of a publicity campaign and they are great at that. to have them working on their own and then doing it then introducing it to the group that can be just fine. and it might even be ideal. there are other groups where creativity emerges best and i don't know if we nailed exactly in advance which falls in which category, but there are other tasks where the exchange of

ideas, either face-to-face or online, is what is most desirable for prompting ingenuity. the jury i think has not come in yet and it may be that there is a unitary answer on which model is better. and to have the kind of flexible manager who is good at knowing both the personnel on the team and knowing the task and what suits their own capacity, that's really good. so when i was in the government i had one person just coming to mind she's a terrific writer. so if there was a memorandum that was going to go let's say to the group, for her to sit down and write the first draft herself, that was really good. and for her to work on that first draft with other people that wouldn't be hopeful. it would slow her down.

so she would do the first draft and then it would be maybe six people who would do some editing of it and they're good at that. they could check and maybe the legal aspects or some other aspects, and eventually they would be more and more eyes on it. often a text is best done that way. if you have a group that's trying to figure out what kind of product is best launched the next year it might be to have some sort of information exchange among a diverse group of people with different ideas that's helpful. so any government, let's suppose you're thinking of whether a sensible policy initiatives for the next six months. it would take a very large brain to get one person who could isolate a very large number of options and list them for the group. probably be better to have a different number of people either face-to-face or online

listing things and aggregate information that way. >> host: and if you're talking about the kind of group work or everybody is sitting together and at the same time talking things through i came across a statistic that came out recently that said in a typical group to think they might've been talk about groups around eight or so, and in your typical group you have three of the people doing 70% of the talking and yet you were saying before that that's one of the things that make groups networks will but if you want evenness of participation. so if you're the leader of the group we see that happening, what do you suggest? >> guest: i would say what i have observed from the years is that they are really alert to that. and if the 50% are dominating the group, or 70% of dominating the group, and you need to get other people talking, do that. so good presidents in our history have been very alert to

this and there's a book to be written about this i think compiling historic materials could be a challenge. good presidents in our history have seen why people are not talking so they think or they have an expression on the face that suggests disgruntlement do they have something to add? so i have thought myself when i've had a manager role that if a few people are talking, even as a teacher there's probably a bunch of people were excellent who have different ideas who are not talking, and just ask them. now, it might be that they have some reason they're not talking. that's a good one, and they need to talk to me personally or to

someone else one on one way rather than in the group. if there's any group were a group of people are not talking there's a risk, there's something about the group dynamic that is not helpful, it just ask them it's a good idea and what its funny i was just in a corporate meeting yesterday where somebody made the point that sometimes it's hard for her to interject out of the blue but he call on her she'll be happy to tell you what she thinks. sowell said, i hate to be called on. i don't want to put on the spot. it seems a lot of the leaders of job is to figure what does each individual need. >> guest: yes that's ideal if the leader can other people well enough. if the leader doesn't have that knowledge, then courteously to ask people, you know do you have anything to add giving them permission to say actually not, that's fine. but also giving them

encouragement to continue something. >> host: i want to shift gears for a minute. i was fascinated to read something of which i'd say about prediction markets and innovation tournament, and i would love for you to explain that. we've heard so much lately that the idea of the wisdom of crowds and you talked about ways that companies are soaring to actually inflict that wisdom. can you talk a little bit about that? >> guest: but we have been emphasizing so far actually has been occasional madness or wisdom of crowds, and that's often because of how people have incentives to contribute nothing. groups don't get what they need. there are ways of enlisting crowds that are more easily feasible because of current technology. so what we've seen a great growth in recent is prediction

markets where you can have the few, if you have a big enough country say, instead of asking the employees whether the products in our launch in january, a little market where they can bet on the day when it's going to launch and they can maybe get a t-shirt or maybe get some sort of coins that they can use to buy some commodities that the product creates. the beauty of the prediction market is that it gives the people betting typically anonymous, so if you think the product is not going to launch ever, you can bet that way and you're going to be rewarded so to speak only once you've been proven right and you're not going to be a naysayer in front of the group publicly post the will you be found out at that moment? >> guest: you will be, but it will probably say that person is more, they get the product wasn't that good. what's been amazing about prediction markets google has

used them, best buy has used them, hewlett-packard has used them. is that what emerges has been highly accurate. so publicly meaning in the newspapers, there's a discussion of prediction markets for elections. so iowa electronic markets ran prediction markets for president election. the british markets are terrific. belief in better than the polls. because people are putting money on the line and if the market is going in a silly or odd direction, and other people are going to put more money on the line and you are aggregating the knowledge of dispersed people. that can be really a powerful tool. so companies are doing it and if it overcomes the problems we discussed of someone saying i don't want to speak out because people will see me as a dissenter and they will think less of me or people saying, i must be wrong because the group

is going the other way. you might think, you know, i'm willing to do it if i have some economic reward coming. and i think i know better than most people. so that works. in tournaments, which are increasingly feasible, treat one online in a hurry, or one's would you say that someone has a better idea than we do they will get an economic reward. netflix for its matching program where, if you like star trek and star wars you also like twilight zone. there is a matching program that was created through netflix a tournament netflix rent it was better than netflix own and i just want to crowds and asked people, can you beat our program? it turned out to work. it's what makes tournaments work really well is that a company can go beyond the kind of small

crowd often as working for it. so netflix and many of the companies are doing this. are able to go out and list expertise and creativity of hundreds or thousands of people who are just out there. and i expect in the next generation requires a lot more of that. partly because the economic reward can be very high in order to get lots of participants because the public recognition can justify the investment even if you don't have a lot of dollars to get. there's something the u.s. government does and many other governments do it, which is a little analogous to the prediction market and the terms in the sense that has the sense of crowd speaking but if you're proposing a rule involving let's say clean air or highway safety or immigration, typically it will go out to the public for comment before it is finalized.

what i've observed in government is that this is a terrific wisdom of crowds, safeguards, in the sense that the government will have excellent people it is to be hoped and often true diverse kind who work really hard on figuring out a role for food safety or reducing pollution of one kind or another, but they won't nail every issue just because they won't know as much as hundreds of thousands or millions or tens of millions of americans. and so the comments will come in saying this one is misdirected this is a mistake. in some cases the whole thing is a blunder and sometimes will be convincing. that is the way of enlisting information that people have. >> host: is so interesting because really the underlying theme of your book and all these different pieces you're talking about, it's all about finding out what people really do think

as opposed to what they say, or what you have access to. >> guest: exactly. one bit of work we did experiments in colorado. we got people from boulder, colorado, pretty liberal territory. we made sure they were liberals by the way, to talk about climate change same-sex relations and affirmative action just in small groups. we took their anonymous views before they start to talk and then anonymous views after they talked. and what happened was that the diverse views relatively diverse of the people of overhead on those three issues, they became much more extreme and unified as a talking to each other. though the group ended up being much more cohesive and unified and left than the individuals before they talked.

we did the same thing during the same period in colorado springs which is a conservative place. on exactly the same issues. they also became much more cohesive, much more confident and much more extreme, meaning more conservative than they were before. so the quote boulder people flipped to the left to colorado springs people flipped to the right. they both lost information in the sense that within colorado springs and boulder there were diverse issues on the views on the issue the kind of fell apart as a result of discussions among like-minded people. i think that's the clue to a problem that countless groups face in the tournament idea the prediction market idea, the public comment idea, all of those are ways of reducing the risk of loss of information. >> host: and it's a similar

place, too where resort where you are talking about juries and the problems jerry starting out with more diverse opinions than they end up with and they get more and more extreme. -- jury. you have been able to amass an incredible amount of information and techniques into what i consider one of the great problems of how to run groups and meetings, and i'm curious i did this but i just have to ask you this in closing as a fellow writer, so you can effortlessly from my point if you put all the stuff together and you did this at the same time that apparently you were writing three of the books in the past year. weight, let me get these numbers because they're so amazing the three books in the last year you've written 28 books to date in your career, plus another 15 that you have co-authored and then another 500 scholarly articles, all while your careers in government in teaching legal classes. i don't mean to embarrass you, i just want to ask you how do you do that?

>> guest: most of the books are really short. some of the articles are really short, so in terms of recent years, i was in government for four years and when you're in government you are working full-time for the american people. you are not doing any writing except writing within government. so i don't a lot, and after i left government i had a lot of ideas stored up and that that apparently resulted with probably an excessive number of words in the last few years. >> host: so they all came out and you can write your next book on time management. well, thank you so much. it's been such a push to talk to you. i really recommend that people read this book to it is absolutely fascinating. thank you, cass sunstein. >> guest: thank you. i thoroughly enjoyed it. >> host: me, too. >> that was "after words,"

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