Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [2]
Why indeed.… But Lazarsfeld then reveals that all six of the “findings” were in fact the exact opposite of what the study actually found. It was city men, not rural men, who were happier during their Army life. Of course, had the reader been told the real answers in the first place she could just as easily have reconciled them with other things that she already thought she knew: “City men are more used to working in crowded conditions and in corporations, with chains of command, strict standards of clothing and social etiquette, and so on. That’s obvious!” But that’s exactly the point that Lazarsfeld was making. When every answer and its opposite appears equally obvious, then, as Lazarsfeld put it, “something is wrong with the entire argument of ‘obviousness.’ ”5
Lazarsfeld was talking about social science, but what I will argue in this book is that his point is equally relevant to any activity—whether politics, business, marketing, philanthropy—that involves understanding, predicting, changing, or responding to the behavior of people. Politicians trying to decide how to deal with urban poverty already feel that they have a pretty good idea why people are poor. Marketers planning an advertising campaign already feel that they have a decent sense of what consumers want and how to make them want more of it. And policy makers designing new schemes to drive down healthcare costs or to improve teaching quality in public schools or to reduce smoking or to improve energy conservation already feel that they can do a reasonable job of getting the incentives right. Typically people in these positions do not expect to get everything right all the time. But they also feel that the problems they are contemplating are mostly within their ability to solve—that “it’s not rocket science,” as it were.6 Well, I’m no rocket scientist, and I have immense respect for the people who can land a machine the size of a small car on another planet. But the sad fact is that we’re actually much better at planning the flight path of an interplanetary rocket than we are at managing the economy, merging two corporations, or even predicting how many copies of a book will sell. So why is it that rocket science seems hard, whereas problems having to do with people—which arguably are much harder—seem like they ought to be just a matter of common sense? In this book, I argue that the key to the paradox is common sense itself.
Criticizing common sense, it must be said, is a tricky business, if only because it’s almost universally regarded as a good thing—when was the last time you were told not to use it? Well, I’m going to tell you that a lot. As we’ll see, common sense is indeed exquisitely adapted to handling the kind of complexity that arises in everyday situations. And for those situations, it’s every bit as good as advertised. But “situations” involving corporations, cultures, markets, nation-states, and global institutions exhibit a very different kind of complexity from everyday situations. And under these circumstances, common sense turns out to suffer from a number of errors that systematically mislead us. Yet because of the way we learn from experience—even experiences that are never repeated, or that take place in other times and places—the failings of commonsense reasoning are rarely apparent to us. Rather, they manifest themselves to us simply as “things we didn’t know at the time” but which seem obvious in hindsight. The paradox of common sense, therefore, is that even as it helps us make sense of the world, it can actively undermine our ability to understand it. If you don’t quite understand what that last sentence means, that’s OK, because explaining it, along with its implications for policy, planning, forecasting, business strategy, marketing, and social science is what the rest of this book is about.
Before I start, though, I would like to make one related point: that in talking with friends and colleagues about this book, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern. When I describe the argument in the abstract—that the way we