Abstract:
Reducing the Social Costs of (Some) Priors

I argue here that some priors – by which I mean prior beliefs, values, identity and identification, temperament, visceral reactions, and other aspects of mental states- that people have can be costly for society. A person who believes the world is not just may not be deterred by standard punishments for societally disfavored behavior such as crime, since he may feel he may get punished in any event. A person whose visceral reaction to a marginalized group is revulsion may treat group members accordingly. A person whose value system is ‘every person for him/herself; caveat emptor’ may create and sell toxic securities to herd- following institutional investors investing for widows and orphans. How might people be made to internalize societal costs of these priors? How might these costly priors be made more costly for those holding them? I explore a few possibilities, all with analogues in dissonance reduction literature.

Bio:

CLAIRE HILL teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School, where she is Professor and James L. Krusemark Chair in Law. She heads the Law School’s Institute for Law and Rationality, co-heads its Institute for Law and Economics, and is an Affiliated Faculty Member of the . University’s Center for Cognitive Sciences. Professor Hill teaches and publishes in business law, law and economics, and behavioral law and economics. Several of her articles have won prizes or been featured in compendiums of noteworthy articles. Her work has analyzed the behavior and psychology of important business actors such as institutional investors, corporate managers and bankers, and has argued for law and policy responses taking such an analysis into account. She is presently researching the extent to which people’s beliefs and mental states affect their worldviews, especially their views about government. She has given several endowed lectures on subjects at the intersection of law, psychology and language.