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Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us Paperback – June 26, 2012

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By understanding how and when common sense fails, we can improve our understanding of the present and better plan for the future.

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 be 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.

Watts' argument has important implications in politics, business, and marketing, as well as in science and everyday life.

Print length

368 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Crown Currency
Publication date

June 26, 2012
Dimensions

5.19 x 0.8 x 8.01 inches
ISBN-10

0307951790
ISBN-13

978-0307951793
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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 principal research scientist at Microsoft Research, was a professor of sociology at Columbia University. 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. He lives in New York City.

For more information visit www.everythingisobvious.com

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 1

The Myth of Common Sense

Every day in New York City five million people ride the subways. Starting from their homes throughout the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, they pour themselves in through hundreds of stations, pack themselves into thousands of cars that barrel though the dark labyrinth of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's tunnel system, and then once again flood the platforms and stairwells-a subterranean river of humanity urgently seeking the nearest exit and the open air beyond. As anyone who has ever participated in this daily ritual can attest, the New York subway system is something between a miracle and nightmare, a Rube Goldberg contraption of machines, concrete, and people that in spite of innumerable breakdowns, inexplicable delays, and indecipherable public announcements, more or less gets everyone where they're going, but not without exacting a certain amount of wear and tear on their psyche. Rush hour in particular verges on a citywide mosh pit-of tired workers, frazzled mothers, and shouting, shoving teenagers, all scrabbling over finite increments of space, time, and oxygen. It's not the kind of place you go in search of the milk of human kindness. It's not the kind of place where you'd expect a perfectly healthy, physically able young man to walk up to you and ask you for your seat.

And yet that's precisely what happened one day in the early 1970s when a group of psychology students went out into the subway system on the suggestion of their teacher, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram was already famous for his controversial "obedience" studies, conducted some years earlier at Yale, in which he had shown that ordinary people brought into a lab would apply what they thought were deadly electrical shocks to a human subject (really an actor who was pretending to be shocked) simply because they were told to do so by a white-coated researcher who claimed to be running an experiment on learning. The finding that otherwise respectable citizens could, under relatively unexceptional circumstances, perform what seemed like morally incomprehensible acts was deeply disturbing to many people-and the phrase "obedience to authority" has carried a negative connotation ever since.1

What people appreciated less, however, is that following the instructions of authority figures is, as a general rule, indispensible to the proper functioning of society. Imagine if students argued with their teachers, workers challenged their bosses, and drivers ignored traffic cops anytime they asked them to do something they didn't like. The world would descend into chaos in about five minutes. Clearly there are moments when it's appropriate to resist authority, and most people would agree that the situation Milgram created in the lab would qualify as such a moment. But what the experiment also illustrated was that the social order that we take for granted in everyday life is maintained in part by hidden rules that we don't even realize exist until we try to break them.

Based on this experience, and having subsequently moved to New York, Milgram had begun to wonder if there was a similar "rule" about asking people for seats on the subway. Like the rule about obeying authority figures, this rule is never really articulated, nor would a typical rider be likely to mention it if asked to describe the rules of subway riding. And yet it exists, as Milgram's students quickly discovered when they went about their little field experiment. Although more than half of the riders asked eventually surrendered their seats, many of them reacted angrily or demanded some explanation for the request. Everyone reacted with surprise, even amazement, and onlookers often made disparaging remarks. But more interesting than the response of the riders was that of the experimenters themselves, who found it extremely difficult to perform the experiment in the first place. Their reluctance was so great, in fact, that they had to go out in pairs, with one of them acting as moral support for the other. When the students reported their discomfort to Milgram, he scoffed at them. But when he tried to do the experiment himself, the simple act of walking up to a complete stranger and asking for his or her seat left him feeling physically nauseated. As trivial as it seemed, in other words, this rule was no more easily violated than the obedience-to-authority "rule" that Milgram had exposed years earlier.2

As it turns out, a big city like New York is full of these sorts of rules. On a crowded train, for example, it's no big deal if you're squeezed in against other people. But if someone stands right next to you when the train is empty, it's actually kind of repellant. Whether it's acknowledged or not, there's clearly some rule that encourages us to spread out as much as we can in the available space, and violations of the rule can generate extreme discomfort. In the same way, imagine how uncomfortable you'd feel if someone got on your elevator and stood facing you instead of turning around to face the door. People face each other all the time in enclosed spaces, including on subway trains, and nobody thinks twice about it. But on an elevator it would feel completely weird, just as if the other person had violated some rule-even though it might not have occurred to you until that moment that any such rule existed. Or how about all the rules we follow for passing one another on the sidewalk, holding open doors, getting in line at the deli, acknowledging someone else's right to a cab, making just the right amount of eye contact with drivers as you cross the street at a busy intersection, and generally being considerate of our fellow human beings while still asserting our own right to take up a certain amount of space and time?

No matter where we live, our lives are guided and shaped by unwritten rules-so many of them, in fact, that we couldn't write them all down if we tried. Nevertheless, we expect reasonable people to know them all. Complicating matters, we also expect reasonable people to know which of the many rules that have been written down are OK to ignore. When I graduated from high school, for example, I joined the Navy and spent the next four years completing my officer training at the Australian Defence Force Academy. The academy back then was an intense place, replete with barking drill instructors, predawn push-ups, running around in the pouring rain with rifles, and of course lots and lots of rules. At first this new life seemed bizarrely complicated and confusing. However, we quickly learned that although some of the rules were important, to be ignored at your peril, many were enforced with something like a wink and a nod. Not that the punishments couldn't be severe. You could easily get sentenced to seven days of marching around a parade ground for some minor infraction like being late to a meeting or having a wrinkled bedcover. But what you were supposed to understand (although of course you weren't supposed to admit that you understood it) was that life at the academy was more

like a game than real life. Sometimes you won, and sometimes you lost, and that was when you ended up on the drill square; but whatever happened, you weren't supposed to take it personally. And sure enough, after about six months of acclimation, situations that would have terrified us on our arrival seemed entirely natural-it was now the rest of the world that seemed odd.

We've all had experiences like this. Maybe not quite as extreme as a military academy-which, twenty years later, sometimes strikes me as having happened in another life. But whether it's learning to fit in at a new school, or learning the ropes in a new job, or learning to live in a foreign country, we've all had to learn to negotiate new environments that at first seem strange and intimidating and filled with rules that we don't understand but eventually become familiar. Very often the formal rules-the ones that are written down-are less important than the informal rules, which just like the rule about subway seats may not even be articulated until we break them. Conversely, rules that we do know about may not be enforced, or may be enforced only sometimes depending on some other rule that we don't know about. When you think about how complex these games of life can be, it seems kind of amazing that we're capable of playing them at all. Yet, in the way that young children learn a new language seemingly by osmosis, we learn to navigate even the most novel social environments more or less without even knowing that we're doing it.

COMMON SENSE

The miraculous piece of human intelligence that enables us to solve these problems is what we call common sense. Common sense is so ordinary that we tend to notice it only when it's missing, but it is absolutely essential to functioning in everyday life. Common sense is how we know what to wear when we go to work in the morning, how to behave on the street or the subway, and how to maintain harmonious relationships with our friends and coworkers. It tells us when to obey the rules, when to quietly ignore them, and when to stand up and challenge the rules themselves. It is the essence of social intelligence, and is also deeply embedded in our legal system, in political philosophy, and in professional training.

For something we refer to so often, however, common sense is surprisingly hard to pin down.3 Roughly speaking, it is the loosely organized set of facts, observations, experiences, insights, and pieces of received wisdom that each of us accumulates over a lifetime, in the course of encountering, dealing with, and learning from, everyday situations. Beyond that, however, it tends to resist easy classification. Some commonsense knowledge is very general in nature-what the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz called an "ancient tangle of received practices, accepted beliefs, habitual judgments, and untaught emotions."4 But common sense can also refer to more specialized knowledge, as with the everyday working knowledge of a professional, such as a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer, that develops over years of training and experience. In his address to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Society in Chicago in 1946, Carl Taylor, then president of the association, put it as well as anyone:

By common sense I mean the knowledge possessed by those who live in the midst and are a part of the social situations and processes which sociologists seek to understand. The term thus used may be synonymous with folk knowledge, or it may be the knowledge possessed by engineers, by the practical politicians, by those who gather and publish news, or by others who handle or work with and must interpret and predict the behavior or persons and groups.5

Taylor's definition highlights two defining features of common sense that seem to differentiate it from other kinds of human knowledge, like science or mathematics. The first of these features is that unlike formal systems of knowledge, which are fundamentally theoretical, common sense is overwhelmingly practical, meaning that it is more concerned with providing answers to questions than in worrying about how it came by the answers. From the perspective of common sense, it is good enough to know that something is true, or that it is the way of things. One does not need to know why in order to benefit from the knowledge, and arguably one is better off not worrying about it too much. In contrast with theoretical knowledge, in other words, common sense does not reflect on the world, but instead attempts to deal with it simply "as it is."6

The second feature that differentiates common sense from formal knowledge is that while the power of formal systems resides in their ability to organize their specific findings into logical categories described by general principles, the power of common sense lies in its ability to deal with every concrete situation on its own terms. For example, it is a matter of common sense that what we wear or do or say in front of our boss will be different from how we behave in front of our friends, our parents, our parents' friends, or our friends' parents. But whereas a formal system of knowledge would try to derive the appropriate behavior in all these situations from a single, more general "law," common sense just "knows" what the appropriate thing to do is in any particular situation, without knowing how it knows it.7 It is largely for this reason, in fact, that commonsense knowledge has proven so hard to replicate in computers-because, in contrast with theoretical knowledge, it requires a relatively large number of rules to deal with even a small number of special cases. Let's say, for example, that you wanted to program a robot to navigate the subway. It seems like a relatively simple task. But as you would quickly discover, even a single component of this task such as the "rule" against asking for another person's subway seat turns out to depend on a complex variety of other rules-about seating arrangements on subways in particular, about polite behavior in public in general, about life in crowded cities, and about general-purpose norms of courteousness, sharing, fairness, and ownership-that at first glance seem to have little to do with the rule in question.

Attempts to formalize commonsense knowledge have all encountered versions of this problem-that in order to teach a robot to imitate even a limited range of human behavior, you would have to, in a sense, teach it everything about the world. Short of that, the endless subtle distinctions between the things that matter, the things that are supposed to matter but don't, and the things that may or may not matter depending on other things, would always eventually trip up even the most sophisticated robot. As soon as it encountered a situation that was slightly different from those you had programmed it to handle, it would have no idea how to behave. It would stick out like a sore thumb. It would always be screwing up.8

People who lack common sense are a bit like the hapless robot in that they never seem to understand what it is that they should be paying attention to, and they never seem to understand what it is that they don't understand. And for exactly the same reason that programming robots is hard, it's surprisingly hard to explain to someone lacking in common sense what it is that they're doing wrong. You can take them back through various examples of when they said or did the wrong thing, and perhaps they'll be able to avoid making exactly those errors again. But as soon as anything is different, they're effectively back to square one. We had a few cadets like that at the academy: otherwise perfectly intelligent, competent people who just couldn't seem to figure out how to play the game.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown Currency; 5/27/12 edition (June 26, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307951790
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307951793
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.19 x 0.8 x 8.01 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #378,518 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Donald Steiny

Important book - essential background for discussions of history, politics, psychology and society

Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2011

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As a published, self-taught sociologist among whose mentors are some of the same people at Columbia as Watts It is no accident that I find many of the ideas and examples in the book familiar. However, it is hard to describe my passionate excitement as I read almost every page. I believe the ideas are important and it is wonderful to see them organized in such an accessible way.

Sometimes one can look at the world almost as the gestalt drawings that can be seen as either a drinking glass or two faces. I suspect that some (many) readers of this book will see one view and not be able to see the other. In fact, I read with great interest some of the other reviews and could see that was the case. One reviewer talked of how "liberals" and "conservatives" would react to the book. I would have thought he might have first suggested some method of verifying his opinion especially in the light of the part of the book that refers to studies that show that our judgment of others' political beliefs are a mirror of our stereotypes. Another viewed the books as being about decisions and referred to a rational choice economist even though many chapters of the book built up to a strong argument against rational choice, not just because we are irrational, but it is a bias and heuristic we use to view the world that is fundamentally flawed.

That being said, the conclusions of the arguments out of context might seem so radical that they would be silly at first glance: the Mona Lisa is not as great a painting as it is cracked up to be, Steve Jobs is overrated in Apple's success, for instance. But even if when you think about it you are not surprised by his ideas that people get rich as much luck as hard work and talent, books become best sellers for essentially random reasons, there many not be any such thing as "influentials", experts and predictions are usually wrong and other such things he goes beyond a deconstructionist program. He suggests some ideas to measure the results of what do and to clarify what are just stories and what are things we can hang our hats on.

One thing that only implies and I recommend considering is how it affects us as individuals. It suggests a way of thinking that can remove a weight from us. For instance, he talks about how meaningless the idea of an "economy," or a "nation" and so on is. I would go farther and point out that "Obama" is just a story we make up out of fragments of information. He does explain in several places about how we paint over the complexity of the world with coherent stories that hide the complexity. If someone can ask the question "why doesn't Obama fix the economy?" the book explains well why the idea of an "economy" is not something we can get our hands on and why we do not have any way of knowing when something happens in society what caused it. Thus, the idea that a person could cause something to happen that affects so many people in any determined way is absurd. I suspect that people that want simple deterministic explanations will feel uncomfortable with the idea that we are hundreds of years from learning enough about the social world to make much of a dent, much less "fixing the economy." On a personal level it is liberating to realize this. It is hard to get too upset at made up people's effect on imaginary objects. It is like getting really mad at the hunter for killing Bambi's mom. You have to get over it. The tests he carefully develops about what we can and can't know are useful in day-to-day life and help create perspective.

If we spend our time being angry at congress, Obama, liberals, conservatives or whoever we choose to blame we wind up in a situation of learned helplessness that numbs our senses and robs us of motivation. Though the project is huge this book suggests how the Internet, new communication technology, advancement in modeling and our thinking about the social world is putting us at the threshold of things we can do that can make a difference. The dogs that were shocked in the learned helplessness experiment that could turn off the shock thrived. This book provides a useful ideas of things we can actually do to improve the social world that creates us.

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JPfrmME

A very important book because of the important message for all of us.

Reviewed in the United States on December 21, 2013

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I would have rated the book a 5 star because of the importance of the explanation of 'common sense' and how it used and how it should be used if it had not been for the fact that the author made it more difficult to read than it should have been by using jargon such as "Black Swan event" which sent me to wiki-pedia to find out what it meant. Going back and re-reading the book, I found that an very difficult to follow explanation was actually in the book however it is not the same as the definition expressed in wiki-pedia. So, to completely understand this topic you would have to read another book by another author who invented the term "Black Swan event". Another reason for downgrading to 4 star were some uses of undefined terms such as 'complex process' vs 'simple process'. The author attempts to define these terms by giving examples which were anything but clear. In spite of the rough spots, the message is important and especially the explanation of how "experts" use common sense to make decisions that effect all of us, while ignoring evidence that is contrary to what they want to believe. It should be required reading for anyone interested in being an informed voter and citizen.

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Kien Choong

Common sense works (say) 95% of the time, but therein lies the danger ...

Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2019

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The key theme of this excellent book seems to be that "common sense" is situation specific, with limited reliability in unfamiliar situations. In particular, common sense:

- attributes ex post rationality to individual behaviour (overlooks behavioural biases)
- overestimates the influence of key opinion leaders (KOL) and CEOs (overlooks circumstances)
- assumes inevitability of observed outcomes (overlooks counterfactuals)
- attributes causality to distinctive events (overlooks confounding variables)
- assumes historical narratives are objective (independent of “end point” or observer’s point of view)
- assigns blame (praise) in proportion to failure (success) of outcome (overlooks randomness)

This book reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's book, "Thinking Fast and Slow". "Common sense" corresponds to System 1 ("thinking fast") in Kahneman's terminology. It works well (say) 95% of the time, but therein lies the danger. We are seduced into relying on common sense all the time.

3 people found this helpful

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None

I underlined a lot

Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2020

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I've been saying for years that books like seven habits of highly effective people, or books about the characteristics of great companies are only valid if you can show that not so effective people and not so great companies don't also have the same characteristics. This is the first book I've read that explicitly makes that point. So I may be a little biased since the author agrees with me. But the author gives excellent explanations of how we use circular reasoning and other flawed thinking to lead us astray. If I was going to deduct half a star, it would be for the fact that I'm not sure most readers will agree with his definition of common sense; it seems bent a little to fit the book, and his suggestions in the last couple of chapters don't seem to have fully considered the ramifications. But overall I really liked it and I underlined a lot of passages. He points out that many people have grandiose ideas for society, based on their own assumptions, and that such ideas often fail spectacularly. I recommend this book. You don't have to agree with every sentence in it to get a lot out of it. Read it. Because I said so.

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Alessandro

An interesting, albeit not revolutionary, read

Reviewed in Italy on December 23, 2018

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There are quite a few good lessons to be learned from this book; although many among us may mistakenly take them for granted or, as the author points out right from the title, a mere extension of what we call ‘common sense’.
A recommended read anyway, even for those who already have a basic knowledge of the topics being addressed.

John Park

En mi top 5 de libros de siempre

Reviewed in Spain on August 31, 2018

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Claro, original y muy interesante. Libro muy recomendable para cualquiera que quiera entender el mundo. Gran autor con una experiencia muy diversa que le hace ser crítico y creible.

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N. Thorne

Great overview of human information processing good and bad points

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 30, 2017

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Read this and you will be able to critique almost every other book putting forward an ill-researched thesis based on major 'success stories' like Google or Facebook or Harry Potter. For example, did you know that at one stage Google tried and failed to sell out for $1.6m ?

This book documents the traps that our pattern matching brains fall into, and how we are strongly programmed to back-fit explanations onto observations. This leads us to massively underestimate the sheer randomness of events.

Luck really does play a far more important role than we all think.

One person found this helpful

Hanz

Excellent Book. A good provoking read.

Reviewed in Australia on October 8, 2020

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The front cover was bend. Looks like it's been read by someone else.

David C.

Not obvious at all

Reviewed in Brazil on June 16, 2016

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Fantastic book about other books, about business, about thinking. Very good at debunking myths. Engaging and funny, in the line of sceptic thought.

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