• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1109 0

book by an unknown author becomes an international best seller, the housing bubble bursts, or terrorists crash planes into the World Trade Center—we instinctively look for explanations. Yet because we seek to explain these events only after the fact, our explanations place far too much emphasis on what actually happened relative to what might have happened but didn’t. Moreover, because we only try to explain events that strike us as sufficiently interesting, our explanations account only for a tiny fraction even of the things that do happen. The result is that what appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories—descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work. Nevertheless, because these stories have the form of causal explanations, we treat them as if they have predictive power. In this way, we deceive ourselves into believing that we can make predictions that are impossible, even in principle.

Commonsense reasoning, therefore, does not suffer from a single overriding limitation but rather from a combination of limitations, all of which reinforce and even disguise one another. The net result is that common sense is wonderful at making sense of the world, but not necessarily at understanding it. By analogy, in ancient times, when our ancestors were startled by lightning bolts descending from the heavens, accompanied by claps of thunder, they assuaged their fears with elaborate stories about the gods, whose all-too-human struggles were held responsible for what we now understand to be entirely natural processes. In explaining away otherwise strange and frightening phenomena in terms of stories they did understand, they were able to make sense of them, effectively creating an illusion of understanding about the world that was enough to get them out of bed in the morning. All of which is fine. But we would not say that our ancestors “understood” what was going on, in the sense of having a successful scientific theory. Indeed, we tend to regard the ancient mythologies as vaguely amusing.

What we don’t realize, however, is that common sense often works just like mythology. By providing ready explanations for whatever particular circumstances the world throws at us, commonsense explanations give us the confidence to navigate from day to day and relieve us of the burden of worrying about whether what we think we know is really true, or is just something we happen to believe. The cost, however, is that we think we have understood things that in fact we have simply papered over with a plausible-sounding story. And because this illusion of understanding in turn undercuts our motivation to treat social problems the way we treat problems in medicine, engineering, and science, the unfortunate result is that common sense actually inhibits our understanding of the world. Addressing this problem is not easy, although in Part Two of the book I will offer some suggestions, along with examples of approaches that are already being tried in the worlds of business, policy, and science. The main point, though, is that just as an unquestioning belief in the correspondence between natural events and godly affairs had to give way in order for “real” explanations to be developed, so too, real explanations of the social world will require us to examine what it is about our common sense that misleads us into thinking that we know more than we do.25

CHAPTER 2

Thinking About Thinking

In many countries around the world, it is common for the state to ask its citizens if they will volunteer to be organ donors. Now, organ donation is one of those issues that elicit strong feelings from many people. On the one hand, it’s an opportunity to turn one person’s loss into another person’s salvation. But on the other hand, it’s more than a little unsettling to be making plans for your organs that don’t involve you. It’s not surprising, therefore, that different people make different decisions, nor is it surprising that rates of organ donation vary considerably from country to country. It might