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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.
- Sales Rank: #203085 in Books
- Published on: 2011-03-29
- Released on: 2011-03-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.54" h x 1.21" w x 5.78" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 352 pages
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."
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- 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
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 lawy...
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Less Than Obvious
By Kevin L. Nenstiel
Consider the last national election, your employer's last annual report, or your favorite sports team's last away-game victory. What made the particular outcome happen? Looking backward, conclusions seem foregone; we construct retrospective explanations that justify how what happened had to happen, because, well, it did. But Duncan J. Wells explains that what seems inevitable once it's already happened, is actually deeply contingent and controversial. Exactly why is both bizarre and revealing.
Trained as an engineer but functioning as a sociologist, Wells has conducted intensive research for America's largest corporations, including Yahoo and Microsoft. In that capacity, backed with massive corporate capital and utilizing technocratic research techniques that didn't exist fifteen years ago, he's investigated questions about how humans make decisions. Not only has this included individual decisions, but how uncountable group decisions form a consensus. That is, he's investigate how individuals make a society.
Watts' answers prove many and various, and deserve careful reading. Their common thread, however, devolves to common sense. A system useful for negotiating everyday interactions, common sense proves more fraught when confronted with the hidden inner dynamics of large groups. Human interactions prove founded on myriad rules, mostly unspoken--as anybody who has ever traveled abroad and unknowingly transgressed serious taboos already knows. These rules are not only unquestioned, but largely unacknowledged.
In this, Watts relies heavily on research avenues first utilized by Stanley Milgram. Though mostly famous for his "Obedience to Authority" experiments, Milgram also pioneered research, like the famous Six Degrees experiment, demonstrating how intensively connected society is. We cannot explain who influences us, and by whom we're influenced, because we cannot comprehend our cultural links. Watts actually replicates some Milgram experiments digitally, proving reality is more linked than Milgram could've realized.
Society proves difficult to explain. In one experiment, Watts, using double-blind research methods and sophisticated online social networks, manages to recreate the digital music marketplace. By segmenting populations into mutually unaware groups, he manages to simulate several different marketplaces, resulting in completely different bestseller lists. This proves that just because certain circumstances occurred doesn't mean they had to occur; reality is deeply provisional. We cannot prove or understand why what happened, happened.
This goes double for situations which, unlike music markets, cannot be segmented and rerun analytically. We cannot, for example, have multiple trial Presidential elections or overseas wars. Explanations for outcomes therefore lack scientific rigor. When Nate Silver gives probabilities for certain electoral outcomes, his numerical assignments mean something very different from Vegas betting pools. The differences are opaque to people who can't access Silver's original math. Therefore we construct explanations retrospectively.
This comes across in popular self-help books which examine successful people to unlock their secrets. Authors believe we'll replicate somebody else's miracle if we simply find whichever magic choice or simple connection made their success possible. However, Watts asserts, we cannot see every influence that steered so-and-so to seemingly inevitable success. Essentially we assume somebody had to succeed because they did succeed; Watts calls this creeping determinism.
(Watts specifically name-checks Malcolm Gladwell for this tendency, though in fairness, Gladwell did write Outliers, which examines successful individuals' cultural contexts, to counter this very tendency.)
Essentially, according to Watts, we don't explain the past, we describe it. Therefore, attempts to construct actually useful predictions prove frustrating. And because most professional soothsayers' predictions go largely unexamined, we must step over corpses of numberless stupid secular prophecies to reach contemporary reality. Certainly, many people my age lament their missing flying car. But most high-profile attempts to apply past observations to future choices remain equally fruitless, and we often don't realize it's happened.
Can we then even make meaningful predictions? Watts says yes, though exactly how defies brief restatement. We must eschew many common prejudices, like expecting meaningful predictions to be particularly precise. We must also limit our horizons: decades-long predictions prove as useless as long-term weather forecasts. And our reliance on either credentialed experts or gifted rookies limits our options. Processes for making actually useful predictions are surprisingly simple, yet because of learned biases, applying them is shockingly difficult.
Watts' explanation of human reasoning, and its limits, sheds powerful light on how important decisions fail. Watts explicitly describes several implications for business, government, entertainment, and other fields, while constructive readers can imagine other fields which suffer exactly the field blindness Watts describes. If you've ever wondered how politicians, CEOs, and media pundits can be so spectacularly wrong, this book's explanations will chill your blood. As science for the masses, Watts is a master.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
An Obviously Good Book
By Silver Screen Videos
Whenever our government leaders fail to solve a problem such as reducing unemployment or stopping terrorism, a lot of people, including some fairly learned pundits, complain that the solution would be easy if our leaders just used some common sense. Similarly, when business decisions go poorly, such as a heavily promoted new product failing, critics say that the mistake could easily have been avoided if the company's CEO had just used common sense. But, as "Everything is Obvious," a fascinating book by Duncan Watts, points out, applying "common sense" answers to major political and economic problems is equally, if not more, unlikely to yield a good result.
Watts begins by pointing out the difference between individual “common sense” decisions and attempting to use those same solutions on a business-wide or society-wide basis. Looking in all directions before driving into traffic makes an accident less likely because you only need to take into account a few other drivers over a limited period of time. The nation’s economy, on the other hand, is affected by thousands of businesses and millions of individuals throughout the world, interacting in a highly complex manner. And, as Watts notes over and over, groups operate in a vastly different manner than individuals do.
In “Everything is Obvious,” Watts explores and debunks many of the common myths that affect “commons sense” thinking. He notes the tendency to try to explain a highly successful phenomenon, like the “Harry Potter” books, simply by listing its attributes. In essence, it’s an argument that “Harry Potter” succeeded because it was more like “Harry Potter” than anything else, and not how or why any or all of those attributes contributed to the success. Part of the reason for blockbusters like “Potter” is that success breeds success. The more people who like something, the more that others will want to try it and find themselves liking it as well. He points to an experiment in which people were asked to select among a variety of songs to download. Some proved more popular than others, of course. But, when people saw how many people had already downloaded each of the songs, the popular ones became much more popular as a result.
The music experiment is one of the reasons why finding answers to sociologically problems has proved more difficult than finding answers to physical ones, Watts notes that physical phenomena can be easily measured and their relationships determined. Once we had accurate telescopes and measuring devices, early astronomers measured the movements of stars and planets, and eventually Newton promulgated his laws. Similarly, in medicine, we can determine if a particular drug is effective in fighting a disease by performing a controlled experiment. Unfortunately, as Watts points out, you can’t invade half of Iraq to determine whether it’s the right thing to do. Sociologists and historians can examine history to determine what happened, but that result may well have been a fluke, since you only fight a war one time. Further, it’s almost always impossible to isolate a single reason, or even the combination of reasons, for why something succeeded or failed.
From a literary standpoint, “Everything Is Obvious” is a highly entertaining read. Watts fills the book with familiar anecdotes (Sony’s failed decision to push Betamax instead of Matushita’s VHS format) and other not-so-familiar ones (how the theft of the Mona Lisa in the early 20th century contributed to its popularity). Trivia buffs will have hours of fun just going through the book for its entertainment value alone. But, along the way, Watts is able to poke holes in some very commonly held misconceptions that affect not just the thinking of the average person but those making decisions as well. And, by the way, the “representative person” myth, namely that you seek to determine the behavior of a group by isolating a representative person and figuring out how and why he or she acts is doomed to failure simply because it ignores the group dynamic.
As for finding solutions to the “common sense” problem, Watts’s book is somewhat short on answers, in large part because the types of problems he addresses still often aren’t susceptible to scientific solutions in practice. Fortunately, with the advent of the Internet and social media, we can now perform some experiments, like the music sampling one, on a large enough scale and with enough variations, to begin to get some answers. And, as he points out, companies that already practice “measure and react” planning are finding a lot of success.
I enjoyed “Everything Is Obvious” a great deal, although at times I found Watts a bit more interested in giving readers the benefit of all the “goodies” his research had unearthed as opposed to writing a more disciplined, highly structured book. So, it’s possible to lose sight of the forest for the trees at times here. However, this book is not a doctoral dissertation or a manual for CEO’s and planners. Instead, it’s a breezy attempt to give the average person better insight into how and why we try, and usually fail, to solve some major problems through “common sense.” And, while it’s not an answer to many problems, common sense tells me that a lot of people will have fun reading “Everything is Obvious.”
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Everyone who has opinions needs to read this book! (Therefore, EVERYONE should!)
By Amazon Customer
Whether you are rich or poor, political left or right, God-worshipping or atheist, a scientist, parent, cashier, C.E.O, customer service rep., fast food worker, this book is for EVERYONE! We all believe so strongly in our, well, beliefs, that we rarely give others the time of day or the benefit of a doubt. The author challenges us to consider-, even for a moment-the possibility that everything is not always as it seems, and that we may all be far more ALIKE than we are different.
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