A Nobel laureate thinks this hit UC Berkeley class could help change the world

The class has an unsexy name - "Sense and Sensibility and Science" - and many UC Berkeley undergraduates who sign up for it say the appeal is that it knocks off more than one of their graduation requirements.

But it may end up being the most important course they take, some students say, and many remember it years later as their favorite.

"Sense and Sensibility and Science" was started 13 years ago by a team of UC Berkeley professors, including a Nobel laureate, who wanted to give students the tools to combat misinformation and improve their communication skills in an increasingly confusing world. They did not expect the class to become so popular - it's now taught at a handful of other schools including Harvard and the University of Chicago - or for their lessons to become even more urgent.

The class is part philosophy and part behavioral science. It's meant to help students make more thoughtful decisions, look and listen past their biases, and embrace humility and the idea that they may not always be right. Assignments include attempting challenging conversations with friends or family. It's a course, say the professors who run it, with the ultimate goal of bettering the world.

Saul Perlmutter, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2011 for his work studying distant supernovas to determine how the universe is expanding, helped start the class in 2013. He said he did so because he recognized that the tools that scientists use to communicate and share ideas could help people have more productive conversations on all kinds of practical, everyday topics.

"There are very few things we can fix in everybody's life by getting to the bottom of the Big Bang," he joked.

"In my grandiose optimistic picture," he said, "eventually everybody is learning this stuff and can go into conversations feeling like their job isn't to convince everyone that they're right, but to figure out where they're making mistakes and hearing everyone out."

The class is offered every spring to undergraduate students. The syllabus includes sessions on identifying and combating bias; recognizing the ways humans fool themselves into seeing patterns; and understanding the dangerous appeal of citing one cause to explain a complex problem, such as blaming crime on immigrants.

For a class assignment on a difficult conversation, one student finally confronted a roommate who kept forgetting to take out the trash. Instead of coming to her angrily, the student looked at her own biases first - why did the trash situation bother her so much? - and went into the conversation understanding that her roommate had her own reasons and biases for not taking out the trash.

"It's not like my roommate was trying to insult me," said sophomore Maude Windsor.

She's since had other difficult conversations, including some around politics with people who did not agree with her. "I just remind myself that it's not personal, or even if I think it is, it's maybe not that serious," Windsor said. "I realize that I'm allowed to remove my emotions from the situation, and I think I'm better off for that."

The class ends with an event called a "deliberative poll." Students break into groups to discuss, debate and vote on a timely topic. This year's class debated artificial intelligence, including whether, and how, emotional chatbots should be regulated for minors and for adults.

The students read an information packet and several proposed regulations, ranging from no regulation to essentially banning AI chatbots. After reading the information, everyone voted for one option. Then they listened to a panel of experts talking about AI chatbots, including how they could help people and how they could cause harm.

After the panel presentation, the students discussed the topic in groups. Then they had one more round of questions with the panel, and voted again. The poll results were reported almost immediately - and showed, in fact, that many students had changed their minds over the course of the panel and discussion.

It didn't appear that anyone made a dramatic shift - no one went from no regulation to banning AI. But some students moved from, say, blocking minors from accessing AI to allowing it with parental guidance. Other students opted for more control after hearing the panelists and discussions.

"I definitely held a more pessimistic side" before the deliberative poll, said freshman Arion Togelang. But he said the panelists helped him feel a little more optimistic about AI and less like it should be regulated to the point of preventing access.

"I think right now it's a little hard for me to understand what AI can do, or what's better about AI than humans," Togelang said. "I still don't understand that, but I can try to share their optimism that it will improve."

Deliberative polling has been used in the real world, perhaps most notably, Perlmutter said, in Ireland, where policymakers used the technique to develop legislation around abortion. The process involved pulling together a random sample of voters, giving them factual information on the topic and access to experts in the field, then polling them on their preferred legislation.

At the end of the polling, the participants favored a somewhat more liberal approach than regulators had expected. That fed into a referendum that removed Ireland's constitutional ban on abortion in 2018.

Still, in the current U.S. climate, freshman Chad Smith said the "elephant in the room" when it comes to the class is how well these lessons hold up in the real world, where many political disagreements feel impossible to bridge.

"I think having more space to be wrong is necessary," Smith said. "What this class did is show us how we lack flexibility. I expected it to be like, ‘Oh, my gosh, everyone is uninformed.' But, really, the Achilles' heel in society is that everyone is too loud. People lack civility."

Togelang agreed with the concept of having more space to be wrong. His father is a MAGA adherent, and they've fought for years over politics. "How can he have such ideas? That used to really offend me," Togelang said.

"It's sometimes hard. You won't be able to change someone's mind really easily at this point," he said. "But I feel like I've changed. Instead of trying to change their mind, maybe I instill this idea that there's still room for knowledge and room to recognize errors. That's my goal nowadays."

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This story was originally published May 11, 2026 at 10:38 AM.