Everything is Obvious Book Summary - Everything is Obvious Book explained in key points

Everything is Obvious summary

Name: Everything is Obvious
Rating: 4.1 (18 reviews)
Author: Duncan J. Watts

Duncan J. Watts

How Common Sense Fails Us

4.1 (18 ratings)

19 mins

Topics

Decision-Making Manipulation Theoretical Philosophy

Table of Contents

Everything is Obvious
Summary of 12 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 12

What’s in it for me? Learn how to avoid the pitfalls of common sense.

Common sense is the loosely organized group of observations and experiences that we each accumulate from ordinary situations over the course of our lives, and it’s certainly useful in the day-to-day. It’s what saves us from the embarrassment of going to work with no pants on and keeps us on the “correct” side of the escalator.

However, common sense sometimes completely fails us as a strategy for making big decisions. These blinks are all about learning to spot these failings and to correct them.

In these blinks, you’ll learn how a certain fashion company made money by ignoring predictions about the future of fashion. You’ll also learn how the fame and glory of the Mona Lisa might have nothing to do with the Mona Lisa itself.

These blinks will show you how common sense doesn’t always translate between cultures, as well as why the Austrians are so willing to donate their internal organs.

Finally, you’ll learn just how severely we are affected by the luck of the draw, and along the way gain some knowledge on how to better predict the future and understand the present.

What we consider to be “common sense” varies strongly across societies.

How do you know that you shouldn't hop onto the subway if you’re not wearing pants? Or that you shouldn’t cheat someone out of their money? The answer is common sense, i.e., a set of shared beliefs that we gather during our everyday lives.

Common sense can define everything from knowing which side of the escalator to stand on to treating people fairly.

Interestingly, however, what some of us in the West consider to be common sense does not apply in the same way in other cultures.

For example, the way people play the ultimatum game is significantly different across cultures.

In the ultimatum game, one player proposes a division of $100 between herself and the other player, offering the second player anything from nothing to the entire $100. The other player then chooses to either a) accept the offer so that both players get the money as proposed, or b) reject the offer, so that both players get zilch.

Several studies have found that in Western societies players generally made a “common sense” evaluation of what a fair division should be, and proposed a 50–50 split. Offers short of $30 were usually rejected.

However, when members of the Machiguenga tribe in Peru played the game, they tended to offer the other player only 25 percent of the total amount, and virtually no offers were rejected.

Conversely, the Au and Gau tribes of Papua New Guinea preferred to make offers that were even better than 50–50, and yet these generous offers were rejected with the same frequency as unfair offers.

This shows us that, although we may be unaware of this fact, common sense is not set in stone – rather, it is a product of our particular society. This distinction matters, because as we will find out when we invoke common sense to solve society’s problems, we don’t always get the results we expected.

Using common sense to make judgments can have disastrous consequences when dealing with major societal problems.

For individuals, common sense is useful for weighing the problems of the day-to-day: it helps us fit in and follow society’s rules. But common sense begins to fail when dealing with larger problems that affect entire societies.

The decisions of decision-makers, such as politicians, social scientists, planners, etc., are often based on common sense, which results in huge mistakes.

Common sense doesn’t account for situational factors and psychological biases when explaining the behavior of individuals.

It is common for people to be organ donors in many countries in the world. But the number of people who choose to donate varies dramatically across different countries. For example, over the span of one year, 12 percent of Germans agreed to be organ donors compared to an unbelievable 99.9 percent in neighboring Austria. Why is this?

The answer is quite simple: in Austria, the default choice is to be an organ donor, whereas in Germany it isn’t!

Common sense prevents us from accurately understanding why some things are more successful or popular than others.

The Mona Lisa is considered to be one of the most important works of art in Western culture, but why? What makes it so special? Aren’t there many other paintings that are just as good? Try this: take a moment and list the reasons why the Mona Lisa is so important. What have you come up with?

You probably formed your answers using circular reasoning, a logical fallacy informed by our common sense. Circular reasoning is a fallacy because it uses the conclusion to justify itself, rather than using evidence to produce a conclusion.

Our common sense falsely suggests that products and ideas are made popular by key individuals.

You’re probably familiar with the phrase six degrees of separation, but you might not know where it comes from.

The phrase became popular after a psychological experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1967, involving 300 people. He found that if someone tried to pass a message to a friend by first handing it to a stranger, it took six connections on average for the message to finally arrive.

When we apply common sense to historical events, we learn less than we think we will.

Many of us have a great interest in history; we enjoy learning about historical events and trying to piece together what happened in times past. But, unfortunately, once again our common sense obscures our view and understanding of the past.

When we look at a sequence of historical events, common sense leads us to believe that one event caused the next, even though the link might remain unproven.

Common sense leads us to attempt predictions that are, in fact, impossible to make.

Experts in the financial sector often seem quite sure of their predictions for the future: “invest in this,” they tell us, “and you’ll make millions!”

Yet so often things don't go as planned, and those who follow the experts’ advice can lose big. In spite of this, these “experts” continue making predictions!

We can still make predictions with certain techniques, but only with a degree of caution.

So we now know that there are certain kinds of predictions we’d like to make, but ultimately can’t. But surely this doesn’t mean we can’t predict anything at all! Poker players, for example, seem quite good at betting on whether they have better cards than their opponents.

So how, then, can we make predictions?

Rather than try to make predictions we should improve our understanding of the present – and react to it.

Each year the fashion industry devotes a great amount of time and energy to trying to predict what people will be wearing the following year. But no one seems to check whether any of these predictions actually come true! It certainly makes you wonder: if you want to run a successful fashion company, then maybe you shouldn’t even bother paying attention to these predictions at all.

As it turns out, the Spanish clothing retailer Zara does precisely that with their “measure-and-react strategy.”

Common sense often ignores the influence of luck on our lives, perhaps causing us to judge unfairly.

If a sleepy driver accidentally runs over a child on his way home from work, common sense demands that we condemn him to prison. Yet had the child not been there, our attitude toward this person would not be nearly as harsh. Can you imagine sending every sleepy driver to prison on the grounds that they might kill someone?

So how do we account for this discrepancy?

We should develop uncommon sense when trying to understand things that appear deceptively obvious.

In physics, we have been able to come up with general theories like gravity thanks to centuries of sustained research. However, when it comes to human behavior, our thinking is still riddled with mistakes, and some sociologists even believe that grand social theories are not useful for understanding complex human interactions.

How, then, can we hope to grow our understanding of human behavior?

Final Summary

The key message in this book:

Common sense, while often useful in our day-to-day lives, fails us when we grapple with complex problems with many actors and perspectives. By understanding the pitfalls of common sense and adopting better strategies, we can improve the way we plan for the future and understand the present.

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What is Everything is Obvious about?

Everything Is Obvious offers insights into the failures of the most commonly used method of explaining human behavior: common sense. By offering sound solutions to common sense reasoning, this book gives the reader the tools to better attempt to understand human behavior.

Who should read Everything is Obvious?

Anyone who wants a better approach to explaining or predicting human behavior
Anyone involved in policy making or business strategy

About the Author

Duncan J. Watts is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and well known for his work on network science. He has also authored the bestseller Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, and was formerly a professor of sociology at Columbia University.

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Psychology Society & Culture

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