Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer [Hardcover]

Duncan J. Watts (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 29, 2011

Why is the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world? Why did Facebook succeed when other social networking sites failed? Did the surge in Iraq really lead to less violence? How much can CEO’s impact the performance of their companies? And does higher pay incentivize people to work hard?

If you think the answers to these questions are a matter of common sense, think again. As sociologist and network science pioneer Duncan Watts explains in this provocative book, the explanations that we give for the outcomes that we observe in life—explanation that seem obvious once we know the answer—are less useful than they seem.

Drawing on the latest scientific research, along with a wealth of historical and contemporary examples, Watts shows how common sense reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into believing that we understand more about the world of human behavior than we do; and in turn, why attempts to predict, manage, or manipulate social and economic systems so often go awry.

It seems obvious, for example, that people respond to incentives; yet policy makers and managers alike frequently fail to anticipate how people will respond to the incentives they create. Social trends often seem to have been driven by certain influential people; yet marketers have been unable to identify these “influencers” in advance. And although successful products or companies always seem in retrospect to have succeeded because of their unique qualities, predicting the qualities of the next hit product or hot company is notoriously difficult even for experienced professionals.

Only by understanding how and when common sense fails, Watts argues, can we improve how we plan for the future, as well as understand the present—an argument that has important implications in politics, business, and marketing, as well as in science and everyday life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Mr. Watts, a former sociology professor and physicist who is now a researcher for Yahoo, has written a fascinating book that ranges through psychology, economics, marketing and the science of social networks.”

- The Wall Street Journal


“It’s about time a sociologist wrote an amazing and accessible book for a non-specialist audience. Everything Is Obvious*: Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts is that amazing book.”

- Inside Higher Ed


“In this bold thesis, renowned network scientist Duncan J. Watts exposes the complex mechanics of judgement and proposes a radical new way of thinking about human behaviour.”
— Scott Wilson, The Fringe Magazine


“Common sense is a kind of bespoke make-believe, and we can no more use it to scientifically explain the workings of the social world than we can use a hammer to understand mollusks.”

— Nicholas Christakis, The New York Times 

“Everything is Obvious is engagingly written and sparkles with counter-intuitive insights. Its modesty about what can and cannot be known also compares favourably with other “big idea” books.”

— James Crabtree, comment editor Financial Times

"Every once in a while, a book comes along that forces us to re-examine what we know and how we know it. This is one of those books. And while it is not always pleasurable to realize the many ways in which we are wrong, it is useful to figure out the cases where our intuitions fail us."

- Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University, and New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational


“A deep and insightful book that is a joy to read. There are new ideas on every page, and none of them is obvious!”
 
-Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of Stumbling on Happiness


"A brilliant account of why, for  every hard question, there’s a common sense answer that’s simple, seductive,  and spectacularly wrong. If you are suspicious of pop sociology, rogue  economics, and didactic history – or, more importantly, if you aren’t! –  Everything is Obvious is  necessary reading. It will literally change the way you think."

- Eric Klinenberg,  Professor of Sociology. New York University


"You have to take notice when common sense, the bedrock thing we’ve always counted on, is challenged brilliantly. Especially when something better than common sense is suggested. As we increasingly experience the world as a maddeningly complex blur, we need a new way of seeing. The fresh ideas in this book, like the invention of spectacles, help bring things into better focus."

- Alan Alda


“Everything is Obvious is indicated for managers, scholars, or anyone else tired of oversimplified, faulty explanations about how business, government, society and even sports work. Temporary side effects of reading Duncan Watts' tour de force include: light-headedness, a tendency to question one's colleagues, temporary doubt in one's own strategies.  Long term effects include: Deeper insight into history, current events, corporate politics and any other human activity that involves more than one person at a time.  Everything is Obvious is available without a prescription.”

- Dalton Conley, Dean for the Social Sciences, New York University


"A truly important work that's bound to rattle the cages of pseudo- and self-proclaimed experts in every field. If this book doesn't force you to re-examine what you're doing, something is wrong with you."
 
- Guy Kawasaki, author of Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, and co-founder of Alltop.com.


"Watts brings science to life. A complicated, global, interconnected world, one which often overwhelms, is tamed by wit, skepticism, and the power to challenge conventional wisdom. The book will help you see patterns, where you might have thought chaos ruled."

-Sudhir Venkatesh, William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology at Columbia University

About the Author

DUNCAN WATTS, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, is a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research. A former officer in the Royal Australian Navy, he holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University. He is the author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Norton, 2003). He lives in New York City.
 
For more information visit www.everythingisobvious.com

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Crown Business (March 29, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385531680
• ISBN-13: 978-0385531689
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.2 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (54 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #54,800 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #28 in Books > Business & Investing > Management & Leadership > Planning & Forecasting

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars If Only This Were Always True, June 7, 2011

By 

L. King "eclectic reader" (Toronto) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer (Hardcover)

This is a personal review - if you haven't come across similar material I think it's a very recommendable read.

I'm a big fan of Duncan Watts' work on Small Worlds, but I did not get as much as I would have liked from his latest pop-sci offering. Some of the material I found new, such as Grannovetter's intriguing threshold hypothesis as to why some mobs gel into mass action and others do not, and he had a very good discussion on the use of online networked communities as social science laboratories, with some interesting results generated from twitter, Facebook and email. And, as is necessary for this kind of a book, there are a number of illustrative anecdotes, such as why BetaMax and Discman failed in the market, but iPod succeeded or Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" - which I just tried out after reading the book, or Zara's approach to marketing. If nothing else it makes for good entertainment and fodder for conversation.

However much of the book hinges around the nature of workable explanations, and I'm surprised that in his wanderings Watts did not come across Herbert Simon's well known The Sciences of the Artificial and his key notion of "satisficing" (we tend to stop at explanations that work sufficiently well, not those that are necessarily true); or the idea of "magical thinking" in allegedly primitive societies; or Donald Norman's The Psychology Of Everyday Things, which looks at the relationship between internal models vs the real world, all of which would have added greater depth to the themes Watts was pursuing.

Then there's the catchy title. If you read Watts carefully one finds that knowing the answer has the effect of increasing the one's confidence in a particular explanation, but that doesn't necessarily make things obvious, in particular when the material requires mathematics, statistics and long chains of reasoning. There's some good material on rational choice but Dan Arielly (who gave the book a good review on the back cover) and John Paulos I've found have done better. Nor does he confront conspiracy theorists, where the answer is used to select the "facts".

So yes, it's enjoyable, but I was hoping for more original results from Watts own work. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

78 of 91 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reasons to get excited about sociology, December 31, 2010

By 

Malvin (Frederick, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer (Hardcover)

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"Everything is Obvious" by Dr. Duncan J. Watts suggests that we are on the brink of a new age of social scientific discovery with profound implications for business, politics and culture. Dr. Watts brings an interesting and rare critical discipline to the soft science of sociology due to his PhD's in the hard sciences of theoretical and applied mechanics. Dr. Watts shares insights gained from his academic and professional experiences including his role as a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research. Accessibly written for general interest readers, Dr. Watts' enlightening book gives us many good reasons to get excited about sociology.

Although Dr. Watts rarely acknolwedges it, his book represents an implicit refutation of Malcolm Gladwell's pseudo-scientific The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Dr. Watts charges Mr. Gladwell with employing an obvious kind of circular logic where a particular social, cultural or artistic phenomenon is heralded simply due to the fact of its success (while ignoring how dozens of others that possessed the same attributes failed). In fact, Dr. Watts argues that answers to the riddles of history are usually not well understood in the moment; it is only with the benefit of hindsight that historians can piece together the relevant factors that might have produced noteworthy events. For example, Dr. Watts argues that Paul Revere was probably no less influential than the thousands of others who branched out to spread the news of the impending British approach; to the extent that the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow might have assigned credit to a single person from the chaos of a complex event, one is engaged in the art of storytelling, not science.

Dr. Watts engages us by discussing a number of case studies that frequently challenge the conventional wisdom. For example, Dr. Watts debunks the idea that the presence of key individuals like Kevin Bacon are necessary to bridge six degrees of social separation. Using Twitter to test the Kevin Bacon hypothesis, Dr. Watts found that ordinary people were able to make all of the necessary connections to deliver messages to specific individuals located in various countries around the world. While common sense but erroneous shorthand constructs such as the Kevin Bacon hypothesis might be helpful in bringing comfort and order to individuals living in a complex world, Dr. Watts contends that together we must do better if we wish to engage in meaningful social planning and decision making.

Why should we care about any of this? For one, Dr. Watts' analysis reframes how we might view matters of social equity. As his experiments frequently prove, the libertarian philosophy makes little sense in a world that is highly dependent on shared responsibilities and mutual interactions; with implications in the way we might collectively decide how to reward the labors of corporate CEOs and bankers on the one hand, and ordinary workers on the other. For another, Dr. Watts demonstrates the validity of both top-down and bottom-up perspectives on matters of public policy. As the ability to harvest and analyze data from search engines like Google and Yahoo! as well as social networking sites such as Facebook continues to improve, Dr. Watts believes that social scientists will be better able to tap the wisdom of local communities to find solutions to global problems. In this manner, Dr. Watts hopes that sound science can do more than simply help motion picture studios better predict the potential box office for a film in a specific community; rather, he hopes that the public will attain the knowledge it needs to demand social justice.

I highly recommend this intriguing and important book to everyone.

41 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you think you know what you know ... you may be wrong, January 1, 2011

By 

Roberta Karchner (United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer (Hardcover)

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If you are an individual who often finds themselves challenging common conceptions, you will love this book! It speaks to the reasons why what we call common sense isn't, the fact that so-called experts are no more accurate in their perceptions and predictions than the public overall, AND will challenge the way you look at the world in the future.

However, if you are a politician wanting to take credit for actions that caused change in the world, or an expert wanting to convince others that you have the answers they need, you might want to give this book a pass. It will not support anything you want it to support.

From the first page to the last, I found myself grabbing ideas, underlining them, writing notes in the margin, and totally, totally enjoying this challenging book.

Since I had recently encountered the Amazon Mechanical Turk, I was thrilled to hear both its history (it was created by Amazon to help identify duplicates in its merchandise listings) and current possible applications both in science and in marketing. Several trials within the book were done using this new potential for hiring a wide range of groups and individuals in order to test the theory and application of the points.

In fact, while the first half of the book focuses on why the models we use to examine past events and predict future trends don't work because of the complexity within individuals and even more within groups, the second half of the book offers solutions, not for long-term predictions, but for predictions of understanding the "near future" as well as what Dr. Watts calls "predicting the present." Most of these involve ways of taking advantage of internet capabilities including social networks and search engines, to map current events.

A quick example is a test concerning the use of search engines to look up flu, flu symptoms, and treatment turned out to be nearly as accurate in tracking the spread of flu in areas as tracking them through the CDC.

If you are in business, this book uses the business model of Zara (a Spanish clothing manufacturer) to demonstrate how businesses can be more effective using a "reactionary" strategy to succeed in today's world. Zara has modeled its business plan to monitor trends that are actually happening and to immediately react to them. This is the opposite of the current strategy of planning and implementing what businesses expect is the future.

In my profession, understanding the past is more important than projecting future trends, and I found Dr. Watt's insights into this area of thought to be among the most challenging I have faced since I received my Master's Degree. Why and how did individuals change history, and even more, are these individuals simply aberrations, or was history ready for them, and anyone would have done.

An example (not from the book) involves Hitler's plan for a master race. We might denigrate the Nazis for their methods, however during this same time frame, the United States was conducting its own Eugenics program, in which certain individuals were sterilized to prevent them from breeding into our gene pool. Both came from the same concepts (survival of the fit and the evolution of humankind), both were (in today's perceptions) wrong, and yet they both happened.

Obviously the uniquenesses of the two countries flavored how this particular scenario played out, but the actions were based on the same information, and responded to by individuals who felt that they were acting based upon conclusions about past events.

While obviously, this is a wonderful textbook for Sociologists, Scientists, and Historians, not to mention many other fields of science, I appreciate the practical implications for business, marketing, teaching, and for those studying for the pastorate (or already involved).

Whew - I am very glad to having been snowed in for a time to be able to spend time with this book, but it is not one to read lightly or take lightly. If you are planning on reading this book, grab your pens and highlighters and plan on some heavy-duty thinking about thinking!!!!

I am keeping this book (and all of my notes concerning it) to reread at least once a year to remind me that you can't make assumptions about the past based upon the results, that it is easy to discard all of the possibilities that didn't happen as impossible, to remind myself that just because two things happened at the same time do not mean that there is a cause and effect relationship ... and that I should never rely upon my own knowledge or a single expert in making an important decision.