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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the H-Bere Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green.

I'm talking today with Cass Sunstein, professor at Harvard Law School and co-author with Reed

Hastie of the new book Wiser, Getting Beyond Group

Thing to Make Groups Smarter.

Cass, thanks so much for talking with us today.

Thank you so much.

So I know in recent years especially, there's been a lot of attention on how

irrational individual judgment can be and I think an assumption among many might be

that a way to counteract some of these irrational

individual behaviors as well you know just put more people together you know two

heads are better than one that kind of thing but in the book you point out

that actually groups can actually amplify our

individual mistakes instead of correcting them. So tell me a little bit about what's

going on there. Why does that happen? There are a few things. It's probably best to

think of people as boundedly rational or incompletely rational rather

than irrational.

That's just what Homo sapiens is like.

And that means that we sometimes are optimistically biased. We think our plans will work out on the schedule we anticipate.

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