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make sense of the world can actually prevent us from understanding it—they nod their heads in vigorous agreement. “Yes,” they say, “I’ve always thought that people believe all sorts of silly things in order to make themselves feel like they understand things that in fact they don’t understand at all.” Yet when the very same argument calls into question some particular belief of their own, they invariably change their tune. “Everything you are saying about the pitfalls of common sense and intuition may be right,” they are in effect saying, “but it doesn’t undermine my own confidence in the particular beliefs I happen to hold.” It’s as if the failure of commonsense reasoning is only the failure of other people’s reasoning, not their own.

People, of course, make this sort of error all the time. Around 90 percent of Americans believe they are better-than-average drivers, and a similarly impossible number of people claim that they are happier, more popular, or more likely to succeed than the average person. In one study, an incredible 25 percent of respondents rated themselves in the top 1 percent in terms of leadership ability.7 This “illusory superiority” effect is so common and so well known that it even has a colloquial catchphrase—the Lake Wobegone effect, named for Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor’s fictitious town where “all the children are above average.” It’s probably not surprising, therefore, that people are much more willing to believe that others have misguided beliefs about the world than that their own beliefs are misguided. Nevertheless, the uncomfortable reality is that what applies to “everyone” necessarily applies to us, too. That is, the fallacies embedded in our everyday thinking and explanations, which I will be discussing in more detail later, must apply to many of our own, possibly deeply held, beliefs.

None of this is to say that we should abandon all our beliefs and start over from scratch—only that we should hold them up to a spotlight and regard them with suspicion. For example, I do think that I’m an above-average driver—even though I know that statistically speaking, nearly half the people who think the same thing as I do are wrong. I just can’t help it. Knowing this, however, I can at least consider the possibility that I might be deluding myself, and so try to pay attention to when I make mistakes as well as when others do. Possibly I can begin to accept that not every altercation is necessarily the other guy’s fault, even if I’m still inclined to think it is. And perhaps I can learn from these experiences to determine what I should do differently as well as what others should be doing differently. Even after doing all this, I can’t be sure that I’m a better-than-average driver. But I can at least become a better driver.

In the same way, when we challenge our assumptions about the world—or even more important, when we realize we’re making an assumption that we didn’t even know we were making—we may or may not change our views. But even if we don’t, the exercise of challenging them should at least force us to notice our own stubbornness, which in turn should give us pause. Questioning our own beliefs in this way isn’t easy, but it is the first step in forming new, hopefully more accurate, beliefs. Because the chances that we’re already correct in everything we believe are essentially zero. In fact, the argument that Howard Becker was really making in the book that I read about all those years ago—an argument that was obviously lost on his reviewer, and at the time would have been lost on me, too—was that learning to think like a sociologist means learning to question precisely your instincts about how things work, and possibly to unlearn them altogether. So if reading this book only confirms what you already thought you knew about the world, then I apologize. As a sociologist, I will not have done my job.

PART ONE

COMMON SENSE

CHAPTER 1

The Myth of Common Sense

Every day in New York City five million people ride the subways. Starting from their homes throughout