Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [136]
24. For details of financial crises throughout the ages, see Mackay (1932), Kindleberger (1978), and Reinhart and Rogoff (2009).
25. There are, of course, several overlapping traditions in philosophy that already take a suspicious view of what I am calling common sense as their starting point. One way to understand the entire project of what Rawls called political liberalism (Rawls 1993), along with the closely related idea of deliberative democracy (Bohman 1998; Bohman and Rehg 1997), is, in fact, as an attempt to prescribe a political system that can offer procedural justice to all its members without presupposing that any particular point of view—whether religious, moral, or otherwise—is correct. The whole principle of deliberation, in other words, presupposes that common sense is not to be trusted, thereby shifting the objective from determining what is “right” to designing political institutions that don’t privilege any one view of what is right over any other. Although this tradition is entirely consistent with the critiques of common sense that I raise in this book, my emphasis is somewhat different. Whereas deliberation simply assumes incompatibility of commonsense beliefs and looks to build political institutions that work anyway, I am more concerned with the particular types of errors that arise in commonsense reasoning. Nevertheless, I touch on aspects of this work in chapter 9 when I discuss matters of fairness and justice. A second strand of philosophy that starts with suspicion of common sense is the pragmatism of James and Dewey (see, for example, James 1909, p. 193). Pragmatists see errors embedded in common sense as an important obstruction to effective action in the world, and therefore take willingness to question and revise common sense as a condition for effective problem solving. This kind of pragmatism has in turn influenced efforts to build institutions, some of which I have described in chapter 8, that systematically question and revise their own routines and thus can adapt quickly to changes that cannot be predicted. This tradition, therefore, is also consistent with the critiques of common sense developed here, but as with the deliberation tradition, it can be advanced without explicitly articulating the particular cognitive biases that I identify. Nevertheless, I would contend that a discussion of the biases inherent to commonsense reasoning is a useful complement to both the deliberative and pragmatist agendas, providing in effect an alternative argument for the necessity of institutions and procedures that do not depend on commonsense reasoning in order to function.
CHAPTER 2: THINKING ABOUT THINKING
1. For the original study of organ donor rates, see Johnson and Goldstein (2003). It should be noted that the rates of indicated consent were not the same as the eventual organ-donation rate, which often depends on other factors like family members’ approval. The difference in final donation rates was actually much smaller—more like 16 percent—but still dramatic.
2. See Duesenberry (1960) for the original quotation, which is repeated approvingly by Becker himself (Becker and Murphy 2000, p. 22).
3. For more details on the interplay between cooperation and punishment, see Fehr and Fischbacher (2003), Fehr and Gachter (2000 and 2002), Bowles et al. (2003), and Gurerk et al. (2006).
4. Within sociology, the debate over rational choice theory has played out over the past twenty years, beginning with an early volume (Coleman and Fararo 1992) in which perspectives from both sides of the debate are represented, and continued in journals like the American Journal of Sociology (Kiser and Hechter 1998; Somers 1998; Boudon 1998) and Sociological Methods and Research (Quadagno and Knapp 1992).