Everything is Obvious: *Once You Know The Answerby Duncan J Watts, (Atlantic Books, £18.99)
The principal idea of this dense, engaging book is that common sense can be more of a hindrance than a help. Many of the ideas that shape the way we look at the world, help us to address problems and account for societal change, are simply heuristics—they are the products of our common sense. Many of them are also grossly misleading.
To illustrate the point, the author, a research scientist at Yahoo!, describes an experiment performed in the mid-20th century by US sociologists. Subjects were told various facts and asked to comment on them. One of these facts was that men from rural areas make better soldiers than those from urban areas. On hearing this, the test subjects mostly agreed that this fact was so obvious as to be almost self-evident. Of course soldiers from the countryside would do better in the outdoors. Of course they would be more hardy—it stands to reason. It is common sense.
The twist is that the fact was a deliberate lie. Research had shown the opposite: soldiers from cities adapt better than their country counterparts. The moral here is clear. That which seems obvious is not always true. But there is another, more fundamental level to this discovery: that when an outcome is considered after the fact, there is a tendency to assume that it was inevitable. So, once we hear that soldiers from certain areas act a certain way, we assume that of course they do. And when we see a profitable and successful company—Watts uses Apple as an example—we assume that Steve Jobs must be a genius because, well, just look at how well the company is doing. With him at the helm, success was surely inevitable.
It is cognitive biases such as these that Watts aims to attack. He does so deftly, writing in that lapidary prose that only scientists can muster. In perhaps his strongest argument, Watts shows how the idea of “common sense” is undefinable. The reason for this is that apparently normal, commonsensical behaviour is based on a very complex set of rules, all of them unwritten and many unacknowledged.
He gives an example of a 1970s sociologist who sent his students into the New York subway to conduct an experiment. Their task was to approach a fellow passenger, ask them to give up their seat and to record the outcome. The experiment achieved fiery results. Those asked to give up their seat mostly expressed annoyance; but the students also complained: the degree of social transgression was almost too much to bear. Watts uses this experiment to show how “common sense” is composed of a vast array of rules, one of which happens to be “no asking for a fellow passenger’s seat on the underground.” Common sense, it seems, is very complicated.
Watts, a sociologist, comes across as a man invigorated. The internet provides the tool that sociologists have been waiting for, an instrument as important to them as the telescope was to physics. Sociologists have always needed large groups of test subjects for their research and creating such groups is time consuming and costly. Now, large groups can be accessed quickly via the internet. A great number of social interactions now take place online where they can be seen—and counted.
One striking example comes when Watts investigates the notion of “special people,” another misconception visited upon us by common sense. It is widely assumed that certain people are social influencers. Through them, ideas and trends spread and for this reason, marketers and advertisers would do well to target them. Watts, however, thinks that this idea of the “influencer,” is nonsense. “When we hear about a large forest fire,” he says, “we don’t think that there must have been anything special about the spark that started it.” Yet when we see something take hold in the social world, we instinctively assume that a special “spark” started it off. In an absorbing passage, Watts shows this is not the case. His method involved monitoring 74m “diffusion chains” on Twitter, set in train by 1.6m users. There was no sign that any one Twitter user had sufficient impact to substantiate the “influencer” idea.
The troubling conclusion is that we simply cannot say who is influential, what idea will take off, which CEO will boost the share price, which company is the best investment opportunity. Sociology, in short, cannot tell us the future. What it can do, however, is help us to view the world in a more reasoned manner, stripped of the gut feelings that lead to wrong-headed certainty. The most important thing, says Watts, is not to look to the future, but to deal with the here and now: to adapt to current states of affairs quickly, to ensure that you are more like the victorious manufacturers of CDs and VHS videocassettes and less like the losing technologies of Minidisc and Betamax.
Watts has put together a thoughtful collection of insights and case studies. But it feels strongly like a collection, rather than a fluid whole. Anecdotes, studies, historical references all flash past, and though this is indicative of the author’s thumping brainpower, erudition cannot obscure fragmentation.
But he is nevertheless an enjoyable companion for these 260-odd pages. His enthusiasm is admirable and the book will hold valuable insights for a great many professions, both scientific and otherwise. The combination of intellectual grandstanding and outright humility is perhaps the book’s greatest achievement.
?
The principal idea of this dense, engaging book is that common sense can be more of a hindrance than a help. Many of the ideas that shape the way we look at the world, help us to address problems and account for societal change, are simply heuristics—they are the products of our common sense. Many of them are also grossly misleading.
To illustrate the point, the author, a research scientist at Yahoo!, describes an experiment performed in the mid-20th century by US sociologists. Subjects were told various facts and asked to comment on them. One of these facts was that men from rural areas make better soldiers than those from urban areas. On hearing this, the test subjects mostly agreed that this fact was so obvious as to be almost self-evident. Of course soldiers from the countryside would do better in the outdoors. Of course they would be more hardy—it stands to reason. It is common sense.
The twist is that the fact was a deliberate lie. Research had shown the opposite: soldiers from cities adapt better than their country counterparts. The moral here is clear. That which seems obvious is not always true. But there is another, more fundamental level to this discovery: that when an outcome is considered after the fact, there is a tendency to assume that it was inevitable. So, once we hear that soldiers from certain areas act a certain way, we assume that of course they do. And when we see a profitable and successful company—Watts uses Apple as an example—we assume that Steve Jobs must be a genius because, well, just look at how well the company is doing. With him at the helm, success was surely inevitable.
It is cognitive biases such as these that Watts aims to attack. He does so deftly, writing in that lapidary prose that only scientists can muster. In perhaps his strongest argument, Watts shows how the idea of “common sense” is undefinable. The reason for this is that apparently normal, commonsensical behaviour is based on a very complex set of rules, all of them unwritten and many unacknowledged.
He gives an example of a 1970s sociologist who sent his students into the New York subway to conduct an experiment. Their task was to approach a fellow passenger, ask them to give up their seat and to record the outcome. The experiment achieved fiery results. Those asked to give up their seat mostly expressed annoyance; but the students also complained: the degree of social transgression was almost too much to bear. Watts uses this experiment to show how “common sense” is composed of a vast array of rules, one of which happens to be “no asking for a fellow passenger’s seat on the underground.” Common sense, it seems, is very complicated.
Watts, a sociologist, comes across as a man invigorated. The internet provides the tool that sociologists have been waiting for, an instrument as important to them as the telescope was to physics. Sociologists have always needed large groups of test subjects for their research and creating such groups is time consuming and costly. Now, large groups can be accessed quickly via the internet. A great number of social interactions now take place online where they can be seen—and counted.
One striking example comes when Watts investigates the notion of “special people,” another misconception visited upon us by common sense. It is widely assumed that certain people are social influencers. Through them, ideas and trends spread and for this reason, marketers and advertisers would do well to target them. Watts, however, thinks that this idea of the “influencer,” is nonsense. “When we hear about a large forest fire,” he says, “we don’t think that there must have been anything special about the spark that started it.” Yet when we see something take hold in the social world, we instinctively assume that a special “spark” started it off. In an absorbing passage, Watts shows this is not the case. His method involved monitoring 74m “diffusion chains” on Twitter, set in train by 1.6m users. There was no sign that any one Twitter user had sufficient impact to substantiate the “influencer” idea.
The troubling conclusion is that we simply cannot say who is influential, what idea will take off, which CEO will boost the share price, which company is the best investment opportunity. Sociology, in short, cannot tell us the future. What it can do, however, is help us to view the world in a more reasoned manner, stripped of the gut feelings that lead to wrong-headed certainty. The most important thing, says Watts, is not to look to the future, but to deal with the here and now: to adapt to current states of affairs quickly, to ensure that you are more like the victorious manufacturers of CDs and VHS videocassettes and less like the losing technologies of Minidisc and Betamax.
Watts has put together a thoughtful collection of insights and case studies. But it feels strongly like a collection, rather than a fluid whole. Anecdotes, studies, historical references all flash past, and though this is indicative of the author’s thumping brainpower, erudition cannot obscure fragmentation.
But he is nevertheless an enjoyable companion for these 260-odd pages. His enthusiasm is admirable and the book will hold valuable insights for a great many professions, both scientific and otherwise. The combination of intellectual grandstanding and outright humility is perhaps the book’s greatest achievement.
?
