Mass Shootings, Racism, and more: The Dangers of Habituation

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, now, Paul Simon’s music is a reminder of how important it is to not fall into old habits and to keep our lives fresh. That subject tackled in a new book by Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, looking at why we become complacent and how to reset our thinking. He joins Walter Isaacson to discuss the keys to living a happier life.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you. And Cass Sunstein, thank you for joining us.

CASS SUNSTEIN, CO-AUTHOR, “LOOK AGAIN”: Great pleasure to be here.

ISAACSON: In your latest book written with Tali Sharot, a neuroscientist, it’s called “Look Again,” and it talks about the role — you use a big word, maybe one of those Cambridge words, habituation in our lives. Tell me what you mean by that.

SUNSTEIN: Habituation just means that the more we do something, the less affected we are by it typically. So, if you go swimming and it’s really cold, the first minute you might be freezing and terrible, but five minutes in, you’re thinking the water’s fine. You go on a hot bath, the same thing. You enter a room where there’s a not very good odor, maybe people are smoking, and after maybe 20 minutes, most people aren’t going to notice it so much. Diminishing sensitivity to whatever we’re exposed to.

ISAACSON: And so, what does that mean in our daily lives? I mean, that seems like a pretty good thing, being able to swim in cold water.

SUNSTEIN: It has some virtues. If you’re surrounded by something that’s unpleasant, if your boss is kind of mean, if your neighborhood is a little terrible, you won’t notice it so much after a while. We do get used to things, and that’s a blessing. What’s not so good about it is if there’s something fantastic in our life. Let’s say we have children, which is really lucky, and they’re incredible, though maybe sometimes a little trouble. And it may be that our job is paying us what we need. And if we thought 10 years ago, we could have this job, we think that’s a dream. But after a while, we’re thinking, OK, I have to go into work. So, things get a little gray. That’s how the human mind works that used to be full of color. And it’s really important for us to be able to see things with brightness and light. And there are ways to get things to re-sparkle. Midlife crisis, for example, is frequently a product of omnipresent grayness for people whose lives are pretty amazing.

ISAACSON: I’ve always thought you could divide people who are really happy versus those who are unhappy or bored, not by so much as what good things or bad things have happened to them, but whether they feel gratitude every morning. Even if bad things have happened, they wake up and say, man, I’m a lucky camper. I’m living here in in this place and whatever. How do you inject gratitude, which is a theme in this book, into our lives so that we, as you put it in the title, look again and revitalize ourselves?

SUNSTEIN: OK. So, working with a neuroscientist got me to understand why gratitude works. I hadn’t gotten that before. And the reason is that with gratitude you’re distancing yourself from something that you would otherwise be kind of right in. So, you might be distancing yourself with gratitude from, let’s say, you have friends who are amazing. And ordinarily in the day, you’re enjoying your friends. You’re not thinking how amazing they are. When you are grateful, you’re dishabituating. You are creating a little dishabituation machinery in your head, and you see them from a distance as someone, boy, how did I get so lucky as to friends like that? Or if you were grateful, let’s say, that you’ve a spouse who can stand you and is maybe fun and amazing, if you have a gratitude, you’re not just saying, this is the person I live with, you’re instead saying, how did I get so lucky as to have that?

ISAACSON: You say that you work with Tali Sharot, a neuroscientist, and you often do your books with somebody else. Why did you pick a neuroscientist? I mean, what did learn about the science of our brain that helped inform this book?

SUNSTEIN: OK. So, there’s a thousand books on human behavior in the mind. This is a very kind of intriguing aspect of current culture. A real neuroscientist knows things that people like me who aren’t real neuroscientists don’t know. And one thing she elicited is that if people are telling things that aren’t true, they will get used to that and accommodate to that, if they’re incentivized to lie. And what happens in the brain is extremely interesting. If ordinary people are incentivized to lie, there’s a part of the brain that’s called the amygdala that is basically the non-technical term on fire, that people hate their own lying. But as they lie more and more and more, the amygdala quiets down until in the course of a day, the amygdala isn’t even noticing that they’re lying. And that gives you a very vivid picture about how the brain habituates to one’s own wrongdoing. It also explains how we might habituate, let’s say, to something wonderful, our brain quiets down. And it also is literally true that if there are colors all around and you stare kind of at the middle of an image that has colors, it will literally turn gray. And neuroscience can give examples like that.

ISAACSON: Explain to me the type of studies you do, because this book is filled with somebody did this study. I often thought that those were kind anecdotal, but in your book, I realized there’s pretty rigorous studies on how this works.

SUNSTEIN: OK. So, there are anecdotes and there are anecdotal studies and they’re pretty rigorous studies where you really get data and maybe you randomize. So, here’s something that is a study which is trying to figure out how much people like their vacations and when do they like them the most. This was done by Tali, co-author of the book, and she found that 43 hours into a vacation tends to be the time when people are most upbeat about the vacation. The first maybe 24 hours, they’re really liking it, but they are kind of figuring it out. After the 43 hours they tend to like it a lot, not as much as right then. And if you ask people what they like best about a vacation, this is a scientific study that doesn’t involve the brain, it involves self-reports, people keep saying the first. It was the first time I saw the beach, first time I sell the hotel, the first time I went in the water. And that is a strong clue about the power of dishabituation to get us to smile and jump, maybe sing, and the power of habituation to get us to start to like things a little bit less.

ISAACSON: But in this case, you know, we could say, OK, let’s take a lot more vacations, but much shorter ones. But let’s take something different. You and I have both been married for a very long time to very wonderful women. How do you prevent that sort of 43 hours after the marriage I’m no longer quite as interested?

SUNSTEIN: Yes. Well, I think for both of us, we’re so lucky that we don’t need to think about how to make things even better because they’re perfect and amazing now. But let’s say for the median person who’s very lucky, but who has been married for a long time, there’s a therapist name Esther Perel, who’s really great on this. And she says, fire needs air. That’s, I think, a brilliant phrase, fire needs air. Therefore, couples to spend, you know, some time apart, not a long time, but maybe a night, or maybe someone goes away for a weekend can be really energizing actually for people. And that feeling even imaginatively to dishabituate a little bit, to think what would it be like if I just met this person and then I got to marry them, that can be a mental exercise that causes less taking for granted.

ISAACSON: Well, you’ve been talking about the both positive habituations where — and negative. And I’ll take the negative one now, which is we get used to bad things. We get used to a neighborhood that’s become filled with potholes of trash. And we get used to problems in our society, and we no longer rise up against them. Isn’t that a real problem for both people and for society?

SUNSTEIN: Completely. So, if you look at how people rate their countries or things in their countries, people who are in countries that aren’t very free, care less about freedom than people do in countries that are free, people in countries that don’t have particularly good healthcare, don’t focus on the importance of healthcare much, that you can get used to cruelty, you can get used to corruption, you can get used to authoritarianism, you can get used to discrimination, you can get used to oppression. And that is the evil side, let’s say, of habituation. And it’s very important to think of ways to have a critical distance from something that’s not very good so that we can struggle to change it.

ISAACSON: How does social media, using social media too much, exacerbate either the problems or get us a solution out of these problems?

SUNSTEIN: Here’s one thing that’s a problem, I think, for all of us. If something is repeated a lot, we tend to think it’s true. It’s just how the mind works. Familiar, truthier. So, if you hear something five times, you tend to think it’s true. And the reason, the technical reason, if something’s easy to process in the brain, we tend to think it’s probably right and that means the brain is going to be credulous with respect to things that are false but repeated. That’s a challenge for all nations. It’s also the case that if people are used to using social media, let’s say a lot, checking it all the time, it’s as if there’s a little thing in their mouth that hurts a little bit or is emitting some noise that they’re used to, they could habituate to it and they won’t feel its annoying presence until they take it out of their mouth. So, we have data suggesting if people take a break from social media, it might be, you know, a full-scale cold turkey for a month or more modest breaks, their well-being tends to increase.

ISAACSON: You say that it can cause dishonesty to escalate social media. And you did a study dealing with that. Explain that.

SUNSTEIN: OK. So, there are two reasons why dishonesty can escalate in social media. One is that if someone tells you something like, here’s how you get to the gas station in a strange neighborhood, you typically believe it. And the other is if someone tells you, let’s say twice, that Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback in the history of the National Football League, that happens to be true. But if you hear it twice, you’re more likely to think it’s true. So, the second is called the illusory truth effect. Repetition increases a belief in the truth of the statement. The other is truth bias. On social media, these are evil twins, truth bias and the illusory truth effect. They tend to get people who are believing something that’s false. What we did was we had a study where people could say not like, but trust. So, you don’t press a like button, you can press a trust button. And that was effective in increasing people’s belief in what was true and increasing the spread of things that were true. Because people knew before the fact that to get something other than the trust button wasn’t a very happy moment. People wanted the trust button.

ISAACSON: You write about Germany in the 1920s, 1930s in particular, being habituated towards Nazism. Tell me how that could apply today to us trying to protect our democracy?

SUNSTEIN: Here’s some very concerning and vivid work on the rise of Nazism. People who were there at the time said it was a little like a field that had corn in it. It kept growing and growing and growing. And eventually it was over your head. And you didn’t know it was going to get there. So, the idea was the way Hitler worked was by increments. Things were getting worse and worse, but it wasn’t like complete horror on day one or two or three. And typically, the rise of fascism and terrible things is in increments. Day one isn’t good but the true horror emerges over time. I think it’s fair to say that both in Europe and the United States there has been some let’s call it democratic backsliding in which certain norms of respect for processes, respect for one another, a commitment to truth, a commitment to treating people who disagree with you as participants in a shared endeavor, that’s essential for mutual, let’s say, cooperation, that all of those have been under pressure and now looks very different from eight, nine, 10 years ago. And it may be that the field is getting populated by taller and taller stocks of corn.

ISAACSON: Is that also true like gun violence? Last year we had 656 mass shootings. Have we become habituated to that?

SUNSTEIN: I think there’s no question that if we had the first mass shooting of gun violence where children were being gunned down, the level of outrage and disbelief would be far higher than it is. So, this is a case where the repetition of the underlying horror reduces people’s reaction to it.

ISAACSON: Let me get specific on like racial and gender discrimination that comes along. And you say that we can, as a society, maybe get habituated to that, but that the people involved aren’t so habituated. Explain how we can build on that.

SUNSTEIN: So, with respect to gender, it’s often the case that in a community people are just used to something. It might be comments that are demeaning. It might be an allocation of labor that’s unfair. It might be something worse. It might be sexual harassment or something. To get a purchase on our own practices, I remember a time when there wasn’t a term sexual harassment, it just wasn’t a term. Sexual harassment existed as a practice, but there wasn’t a word for it. Catharine MacKinnon, more than any other, made public the term. I’m not sure if it’s actually her term, but she wrote a brilliant book called “Sexual Harassment of Working Women.” And that book was full of legal analysis, but also tales of sexual harassment. And gosh, was that a dishabituating book for men in particular, but also for many women who thought, what world am in such that these practices exist? And that can be done with respect to race also, where there’s, let’s say, egregious discrimination that maybe even the people who are engaged in the egregious discrimination or the comments they’re not dishabituated from their own practice sufficiently. It’s not that they’re bad people, it’s that this is what they know.

ISAACSON: Yes, but the people who are the victims of the, say, racial discrimination, they don’t get habituated as easily. I mean, I remember talking about Robert E. Lee being a statue, talking to Wynton Marsalis from a hometown. I said, man, I’m used to that. I don’t even pay — he says, I pay attention. So, tell me how that works.

SUNSTEIN: OK. So, let’s suppose there’s a discriminatory practice. Let’s just say it’s discriminatory against Catholics. It may be that non-Catholics think this is life and, you know, that’s how it is. But for someone who’s Catholic, it’s going to be like a slap in the face. And they might habituate to it in the sense that they see it as part of their culture, but it’s not something that doesn’t sting when you get slapped in the face. And for a person of color, there are places and maybe states or months where you get slapped in the face a lot, and getting slapped in the face always hurts. And even if there’s no particular white person who’s done the slap, or even if no white person in the vicinity intended the slap, the slap is there. It might be built into a practice. It might be built into some kind of language.

ISAACSON: And so, as a society, give us sort of one or two pieces of advice you would give right now, given our current situation for us to look again as a society.

SUNSTEIN: Take a critical distance from practices that are in our society. Imagine that this was the first time you saw them, or imagine it was the last time you were ever going to see them. If you do that exercise, then some things will seem like, gosh, we don’t have to live with this. And other things, will make us think, how do we get so lucky as to leave with that?

ISAACSON: Cass Sunstein, once again, thank you so much for joining us.

SUNSTEIN: Thank you. A great pleasure.