Common Sense Is Not What We Think It Is
Clue: It’s neither common nor sensible
When we say, “it’s common sense,” we mean “it’s obvious”. Well, common sense is neither common across cultures nor does it reflect sensibility.
Duncan J. Watts, author of “Everything Is Obvious Once You Know the Answer: How Common sense Fails Us,”, defines common sense as:-
the loosely organized set of facts, observations,, experiences, insights, and pieces of received wisdom that each of us accumulates over a lifetime, in the course of encountering, dealing with, and learning from, everyday situations.
Common sense is therefore accumulated knowledge and wisdom imparted by our daily lives. It’s not the same as intelligence or rationality.
Commonsense knowledge has two distinct characteristics that distinguish it from formal knowledge.
- Formal knowledge is theoretical while commonsense knowledge is practical.
- Formal knowledge deals with categories and general principles which can be stated as ‘laws’. Commonsense knowledge deals with everyday situations on their own terms. For example, what we wear in the office or how we talk to our bosses is commonsense knowledge.
#1. Common sense is not common, it’s culture-specific
Common sense varies from place to place. It’s not a common human attribute. Commonsense reasoning once justified slavery, cannibalism, and female genital mutilation.
When two Americans meet, they shake hands, when two Indians meet, they fold their hands, and when two Japanese meet, they bow their heads.
Duncan J. Watts cites the example of how a group of economists and anthropologists devised a game, called the “ultimate” game, which they tested in different cultures.
This game involves two persons. One of them gets $100 and has to propose a split to the other person. It can be anything between the total amount or nothing at all. If the second player accepts the offer, the deal is closed and they part ways. If he rejects the offer, neither player gets anything.
When the researchers tried the game with volunteers in industrialised countries, they found that most offers were for a fifty-fifty split. The subjects rejected anything less than $30. Here commonsense reasoning reckoned that anything less than one third was not fair.
The concept of fairness differs across cultures.
The results were different when they played the game in pre-industrial societies. With the Machiguenga tribe of Peru, the typical offer was around a quarter of the amount and they accepted most of the offers. This was because this tribe lived in closed societies. There was no obligation to make generous offers to strangers. Their notion of fairness did not provoke any resentment among the receivers.
With the Au and Ganu tribes of Papua New Guinea, the offers were generous, yet rejected. This tribe has a tradition of gift exchange where the receivers had the obligation to reciprocate when they received gifts. They viewed the “ultimatum game” through the prism of their cultural practice. A generous gift was burdensome as it carried the obligation to repay.
When two persons agree over what is common sense, it means they share cultural practices and beliefs. Disagreements will arise if they don’t share tacit knowledge about a particular culture.
Commonsense reasoning is error-prone
Commonsense reasoning is more suited to solving everyday problems than large matters of policy and planning.
Everyday problems have a narrow scale and range. We can break them down to manageable chunks We can easily relate the problems to our accumulated knowledge about life.
Common sense fails, however, when the problems involve numerous people distant in time and space.
Our beliefs lack a coherent framework. They are often contradictory and fragmented worldviews. A belief that arises in one context may not fit into another different context.
Even our aphorisms are contextual. We say, “look before you leap”, and in the same breath we say, “he who hesitates is lost”.
Governments, planners, and experts plan and design spectacular projects with good intentions. Their commonsense reasoning that is rooted in everyday situations, fails to account for the beliefs, behaviours and attitudes of many people.
For example, low-income housing projects to help slum-dwellers like the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago failed and turned into the worst centres of vandalism and delinquency because the project failed to create the eco-system for a trouble-free life.
Commonsense error#1
Common sense lulls us into judging, explaining, and predicting human behaviour based on certain mental models. For instance, we try to explain human behaviour in terms of motives, incentives, and beliefs of which we are consciously aware. We don’t realize that what we see is only the tip of the iceberg. We don’t see hidden motives, influences, and cognitive fallacies that shape human behaviour in unpredictable ways.
For example, we ignore the influence of default settings and search for explanations in understanding surprising differences in human behaviour. What explains the difference in organ donation rates between Germany where it is about 12% and Austria where it is 99.9%?
In Austria, the default choice is to be an organ donor. One either mails a simple form to be an organ donor or does not. It’s an opt-out policy whereas, in Germany, it’s an opt-in policy.
Common sense cannot capture hidden forces like priming, anchoring, confirmation bias, availability, and motivated reasoning.
Buyers in a wine shop bought German wine when they listened to German music. We paid more to a charity than we intended because we were ‘anchored’ with a suggested amount.
To know what is relevant in a given situation is the basis of commonsense knowledge, but multiple factors influence even the simplest of situations.
Commonsense error #2
Commonsense reasoning tries to explain collective behaviour with the templates used to understand individual behaviour.
Interactions of groups of people create unique group dynamics that are more than the sum of the individual parts.
We harmonize groups into chunks of representative individuals like “the crowd”, “the market”, “the workers”, or the “electorate”, “influencers”or “special people”.
We decide which painting, book, or film is popular or unpopular depending on whether large numbers believe them to be so. The behaviour of the parts cannot explain the behaviour of the whole.
We use circular reasoning to circumvent the collective-individual or the macro-micro problem.
Like how Mona Lisa became the most famous painting in the world by sheer accident. There is an interesting history behind how Mona Lisa became the artistic mascot of Western culture, although there were better painters than Leonardo da Vinci and better paintings than Mona Lisa.
Leonardo took sixteen years before he finished Mona Lisa in 1519 and then moved to France where he sold it to the French King. The world did not know of its existence until the beginning of the 20th century. On August 21, 1911, an Italian employee stole the painting from a Paris museum because he felt the painting belonged to Italy. When he was caught two years later, his daring exploit caught the imagination of people in France and Italy.
Mona Lisa not only became famous, people suddenly discovered the attributes of a masterpiece in the painting. Art critics attributed qualities to the painting that even Leonardo might not have seen. They decided Mona Lisa was the best painting first and then treated it as the touchstone of the metrics of excellence.
Mona Lisa became famous because it was Mona Lisa.
The wisdom or madness of the crowd flows from the actions of individuals. Commonsense reasoning cannot unravel the macro-micro entanglements.
When the publisher of Lynne Truss’s surprising bestseller, “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves”, was asked to explain its success, he said, “it sold well because lots of people bought it.”
Commonsense error #3
Common sense struggles to understand history because nobody writes history while it’s happening. It’s difficult to make sense of what’s happening until its complications are resolved. It tries to make sense of history by adding interesting after- the- event narratives that invoke knowledge of a later period. This misperception makes us try predicting the future based on the narratives.
In much of life, in other words, the very notion of a well-defined “outcome”, at which point we can evaluate, once and for all, the consequences of an action is a convenient fiction. In reality, the events that we label as outcomes are never really end-points. Instead, they are artificially imposed milestones, just as the ending of a movie is really an artificial end to what in reality would be an ongoing story. (Duncan J. Watts)
Commonsense reasoning makes us take a deterministic view of history. We conflate why something happened with what happened.
The surge in troop deployment in Iraq in 2007 reduced violence the next year. There were many fortuitous circumstances that aided the reduction in violence besides the induction of more troops. The only thing that stood out was the troop deployment because common sense favoured that narrative.
Commonsense error#4
Simplistic explanations of the past make experts predict the future confidently. Common sense doesn’t discriminate between predictions we can make and those we can’t make.
Common sense- based predictions consider only important outcomes. There is no attempt to expect which events will be important in the future.
Financial experts rely on past data to predict the future without considering the complexities underlying the financial sector. They don’t consider the “unknown unknowns”, and the unlikely Black Swan events that could disrupt with their serious consequences.
How to bypass the influence of common sense
To avoid the commonsense-based pitfalls in making predictions and decisions, author Duncan J. Watts suggests three strategies.
The first is to rely on prediction markets. This is to rely on the wisdom of the crowd. In a prediction market, buyers and sellers trade specially designed securities whose prices correspond to the predicted probability about a specific outcome. Many participants will cancel out the mistakes of individuals.
Second, do away with predictions and adopt a “measure and react” approach which involves measuring the present state of the world in real-time and reacting quickly.
Third, co-opt local knowledge. Consult people who are closest to the planned action.
Wrapping up
To sum up, common sense varies from place to place. It is embedded in the culture. It’s the body of knowledge we accumulate from our daily lives.
Common sense is useful to solve everyday problems. Common sense fails us when it comes to large issues of policy and planning involving many actors and complex situations.
Our awareness about the pitfalls of common sense and the adoption of better strategies will help us understand the present and predict the future with reasonable clarity and accuracy.
Thanks for reading!
