Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [14]
HOW COMMON SENSE FAILS US
Without a doubt, the experience of participating in the social world greatly facilitates our ability to understand it. Were it not for the intimate knowledge of our own thought processes, along with countless observations of the words, actions, and explanations of others—both experienced in person and also learned remotely—the vast intricacies of human behavior might well be inscrutable. Nevertheless, the combination of intuition, experience, and received wisdom on which we rely to generate commonsense explanations of the social world also disguises certain errors of reasoning that are every bit as systematic and pervasive as the errors of commonsense physics. Part One of this book is devoted to exploring these errors, which fall into three broad categories.
The first type of error is that when we think about why people do what they do, we invariably focus on factors like incentives, motivations, and beliefs, of which we are consciously aware. As sensible as it sounds, decades of research in psychology and cognitive science have shown that this view of human behavior encompasses just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It doesn’t occur to us, for example, that the music playing in the background can influence our choice of wine in the liquor store, or that the font in which a statement is written may make it more or less believable; so we don’t factor these details into our anticipation of how people will react. But they do matter, as do many other apparently trivial or seemingly irrelevant factors. In fact, as we’ll see, it is probably impossible to anticipate everything that might be relevant to a given situation. The result is that no matter how carefully we try to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, we are likely to make serious mistakes when predicting how they’ll behave anywhere outside of the immediate here and now.
If the first type of commonsense error is that our mental model of individual behavior is systematically flawed, the second type is that our mental model of collective behavior is even worse. The basic problem here is that whenever people get together in groups—whether at social events, workplaces, volunteer organizations, markets, political parties, or even as entire societies—they interact with one another, sharing information, spreading rumors, passing along recommendations, comparing themselves to their friends, rewarding and punishing each other’s behaviors, learning from the experience of others, and generally influencing one another’s perspectives about what is good and bad, cheap and expensive, right and wrong. As sociologists have long argued, these influences pile up in unexpected ways, generating collective behavior that is “emergent” in the sense that it cannot be understood solely in terms of its component parts. Faced with such complexity, however, commonsense explanations instinctively fall back on the logic of individual action. Sometimes we invoke fictitious “representative individuals” like “the crowd,” “the market,” “the workers,” or “the electorate,” whose actions stand in for the actions and interactions of the many. And sometimes we single out “special people,” like leaders, visionaries, or “influencers” to whom we attribute all the agency. Regardless of which trick we use, however, the result is that our explanations of collective behavior paper over most of what is actually happening.
The third and final type of problem with commonsense reasoning is that we learn less from history than we think we do, and that this misperception in turn skews our perception of the future. Whenever something interesting, dramatic, or terrible happens—Hush Puppies become popular again, a