Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [153]
9. Indeed, as Becker (1945, p. 84) noted long ago, natural scientists are every bit as prone as social scientists to overestimate their ability to construct predictive models of human behavior.
10. Stouffer (1947).
11. It should be noted that not all sociologists agree that measurement is really the problem that I’m making it out to be. According to at least one school of thought, sociological theories should help us to make sense of the world, and give us a language with which to argue about it; but they shouldn’t aim to make predictions or to solve problems, and so shouldn’t be judged by the pragmatic test in the first place. If this “interpretive” view of sociology is correct, the whole positivist enterprise that began with Comte is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of social science, starting with assumption that it ought to be considered a branch of science at all (Boudon, 1988b). Sociologists, therefore, would do better to focus on developing “approaches” and “frameworks”—ways of thinking about the world that allow them to see what they might otherwise miss, and question what other people take for granted—and forget all about trying to build theories of the kind that are familiar to us from physics. It was essentially this kind of approach to sociology, in fact, that Howard Becker was advocating in his book Tricks of the Trade, the review of which I encountered back in 1998, and that John Gribbin—the reviewer, who, remember, is a physicist—evidently found infuriating.
12. See, for example, Paolacci et al. (2010).
13. The privacy debate is an important one, and raises a number of unresolved questions. First, when asked, people say they care deeply about maintaining their privacy (Turow et al. 2009); however, their actions frequently belie their responses to survey questions. Not only do many people post a great deal of highly personal information about themselves in public but they also decline to pay for services that would guarantee them a higher than default level of privacy. Possibly this disconnect between espoused and revealed preferences implies only that people do not understand the consequences of their actions; but it may also imply that abstract questions about “privacy” are less meaningful than concrete tradeoffs in specific situations. A second, more troubling problem is that regardless of how people “really” feel about revealing particular pieces of information about themselves, they are almost certainly unable to appreciate the ability of third parties to construct information profiles about them, and thereby infer other information that they would not feel comfortable revealing.
14. See Sherif (1937) and Asch (1953) for details of their pioneering experiments. See Zelditch (1969) for his discussion of small-group versus large-group studies. See Adar and Adamic (2005), Sun et al. (2009), and Bakshy and Adamic (2009) for other examples of tracking information diffusion in online networks.
15. Now that they’ve proven the concept, Reiley and Lewis are embarking on a whole array of similar experiments—for department stores, phone providers, financial services companies, and so on—with the aim of measuring differences across domains (do ads work differently for phones than for credit cards?), across demographics (are older people more susceptible than younger?), and even across specific ad layouts and designs (blue background versus white?).
16. See Lazarsfeld and Merton (1954) for the original definition of “homophily,” and McPherson et al. (2001) for a recent survey of the literature. See Feld (1981) and McPherson and Smith-Lovin (1987) for discussion of the importance of structural opportunities.
17. The reason is that social structure not only shapes our choices but is also shaped by them. It is true, for example, that whom we are likely to meet in the immediate future is determined to some degree by our existing social circles and activities. But on a slightly longer timescale it is also true that we may choose to do certain things over others precisely