The Simplicity Trap
Credibility and simplicity are a deadly combination.
I’ve recently been listening to If Books Could Kill, a brilliant podcast that takes a critical eye to best-selling airport books that offer simple solutions to the world’s biggest problems.
One theme quickly emerges: oversimplification. Best-selling books make it easy for readers to swallow a simple story. It follows that a new version of the truth is stickier and more memorable when it’s staring us in the face.
One example the podcasting duo give is from the international bestseller, Freakonomics. The book has many famous case studies, but perhaps the most well-known is their observation that the decrease in crime in early 1990s America was due to the legalisation of abortion eighteen years earlier.
If Books Could Kill hosts Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri are not the first to debunk this as a gross oversimplification of the truth. In an era where affluence grew, police forces strengthened and education increased, abortion is one of a myriad of influential factors. But admitting to the added complexity: “ok, it was a bit of everything” is no longer as simple and sticky, so does not sell.
Complexity is Calling
It’s easy to slam books for oversimplifying the truth, but keeping things simple is an achievement in itself. Complexity Bias suggests that when humans explain or interrogate ideas they naturally gravitate towards complexity. Confucius saw this coming: “life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
We can assume, based on complexity bias, that the authors of these books began from a complex starting point. Much like Mark Twain’s famous quip “if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”, we can assume it took the authors significant time, effort and skill to distil it down into a simpler version.
The authors recognised that whilst we trust complex ideas, simplicity is sticky and memorable. In short, simplicity generates virality in a way complex ideas cannot. When your goal is book sales or social media engagement, simplicity is the way to go.
Credibility is the secret sauce
Complex ideas risk getting lost, yet studies show simple ideas are more easily challenged. So how did these oversimplified concepts in bestsellers such as Freakonomics go decades without significant criticism in the public eye? Framing. They’re simple ideas dressed in elaborate clothing.
The Freakonomics authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt first established their own credibility as experts in the field, both within the book and via a New York Times collaboration years before the book came about. They frame the ‘aha! moments’ in the book carefully, explaining that experts in the field missed this one critical observation.
The framing of their experience reassures us enough to switch off our critical eye: “these renowed economists have done their due diligence. They’ve identified something even the experts have missed!”
At this point, we trust the authors, and we’re ready to lap up simple, sticky, memorable ideas. The more they indulge oversimplified versions of the truth, the more we read and preach their gospel.
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How to keep a critical eye open?
Just as brands are shortcuts to choice, credibility and reliability, so ‘people brands’, accolades or “badges” are a shortcut to trust. Once we fall for them, we struggle to keep our critical eye open and switch into autopilot, swallowing simple ideas along the way.
Simple Sells. We never think of pop science and self-help books as sales pitches, but it’s worth shifting our perspectives: these volumes exist exclusively to sell us an idea and rely on our word-of-mouth marketing to sell more copies.
I’ve been pondering some questions we can ask to keep a critical eye when we read the latest airport bestseller. Here they are:
If a stranger made up the central message, how would I respond?
We’re all blinded by titles and assume any published writer is an expert in their field. But what if we stripped all that away and assumed a stranger on the bus told us the central theme of the book? “Did you know that if you practise, you can get one percent better every day?” (Atomic Habits, James Clear). Yes, stranger, I know “practise makes perfect” but surely I can’t expect consistent improvements of that magnitude every day, long past the hundred-day threshold?
What’s missing?
So often, crucial details are missing because it’s only one side of the story. In Freakonomics, many factors that contribute to lower crime rates but are almost impossible to quantify are mysteriously omitted. A great example of this is increased policing: does this increase the crime rate (more crimes reported) or decrease the crime rate (more police on the streets means more crimes prevented)? Similarly, in Nudge, the famous organ donation ‘nudge’ case, where creating an “opt out” tickbox staggeringly increases organ donations omits crucial technical details: whilst more individuals have opted into organ donation, the medical system has not been able to translate that increase into active organ donations due to strains on staff training and logistics. The results in most countries are negligible.
Why now? What makes this a right-place-right-time story?
Authors often take advantage of the cultural zeitgeist in order to ensure we accept the context behind the facts. Last week I wrote about the proliferation of “do less” books. In an era of quiet quitting, increasing demand for flexible work and a shaky economic climate, no one will argue that it’s a good idea to do more, not less. These books lose our ‘critical eye’ and we lap up their advice because they feel a natural extension of the world we inhabit.
If simple sells, the best we can do is become aware of when we are being ‘sold to’ and keep our critical eye sharply trained. On the flipside, there’s a clear opportunity to use it to our advantage. Practising the killer combination of credibility and simplicity can help us get people on board with our point of view. More on that next week.
Author’s Note
If Books Could Kill is helping me to retrain my lazy critical eye. The more hyped the book, the harder it is to critique the great truths within it — how can millions of readers be wrong? I was shocked to learn that James Clear cites Reddit and Twitter in a lot of his sources for the book Atomic Habits and also draws graphs with no data. We love simple so much, we’re willing to overlook all the basic rules of science (gathering data from credible sources) and swallow ideas without question. How do you stay alert to oversimplified storytelling in books?
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