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NOTES
PREFACE: A SOCIOLOGIST’S APOLOGY
1. For John Gribbin’s review of Becker (1998), see Gribbin (1998).
2. See Watts (1999) for a description of small-world networks.
3. See, for example, a recent story on the complexity of modern finance, war, and policy (Segal 2010).
4. For a report on Bailey-Hutchinson’s proposal, see Mervis (2006). For a report on Senator Coburn’s remarks, see Glenn (2009).
5. See Lazarsfeld (1949).
6. For an example of the “it’s not rocket science” mentality, see Frist et al. (2010).
7. See Svenson (1981) for the result about drivers. See Hoorens (1993), Klar and Giladi (1999), Dunning et al (1989), and Zuckerman and Jost (2001) for other examples of illusory superiority bias. See Alicke and Govorun (2005) for the leadership result.
CHAPTER 1: THE MYTH OF COMMON SENSE
1. See Milgram’s Obedience to Authority for details (Milgram, 1969). An engaging account of Milgram’s life and research is given in Blass (2009).
2. Milgram’s reaction was described in a 1974 interview in Psychology Today, and is reprinted in Blass (2009). The original report on the subway experiment is Milgram and Sabini (1983) and has been reprinted in Milgram (1992). Three decades later, two New York Times reporters set out to repeat Milgram’s experiment. They reported almost exactly the same experience: bafflement, even anger, from riders; and extreme discomfort themselves (Luo 2004, Ramirez and Medina 2004).
3. Although the nature and limitations of common sense are discussed in introductory sociology textbooks (according to Mathisen [1989], roughly half of the sociology texts he surveyed contained references to common sense), the topic is rarely discussed in sociology journals. See, however, Taylor (1947), Stouffer (1947), Lazarsfeld (1949), Black (1979), Boudon (1988a), Mathisen (1989), Bengston and Hazzard (1990), Dobbin (1994), and Klein (2006) for a variety of perspectives by sociologists. Economists have been even less concerned with common sense than sociologists, but see Andreozzi (2004) for some interesting remarks on social versus physical intuition.
4. See Geertz (1975, p.6).
5. Taylor (1947, p. 1).
6. Philosophers in particular have wondered about the place of common sense in understanding the world, with the tide of philosophical opinion going back and forth on the matter of how much respect common sense ought to be given. In brief, the argument seems to have been about the fundamental reliability of experience itself; that is, when is it acceptable to take something—an object, an experience, or an observation—for granted, and when must one question the evidence of one’s own senses? On one extreme were the radical skeptics, who posited that because all experience was, in effect, filtered through the mind, nothing at all could be taken for granted as representing some kind of objective reality. At the other extreme were philosophers like Thomas Reid, of the Scottish Realist School, who were of the opinion that any philosophy of nature ought to take the world “as it is.” Something of a compromise position was outlined in America at the beginning of the ninteenth century by the pragmatist school of philosophy, most prominently William James and Charles Saunders Peirce, who emphasized the need to reconcile abstract knowledge of a scientific kind with that of ordinary experience, but who also held that much of what passes for common sense was to be regarded with suspicion (James 1909, p 193). See Rescher (2005) and Mathisen (1989) for discussions of the history of common sense in philosophy.
7. It should be noted that commonsense reasoning also seems to have backup systems that act like general principles. Thus when some commonsense rule for dealing with some particular situation fails, on account of some previously unencountered contingency, we are not completely lost, but rather simply refer to this more general covering rule for guidance. It should also be noted, however, that attempts to formalize this backup system, most notably in artificial intelligence research, have so far been unsuccessful (Dennett 1984); thus, however it works, it does not resemble the logical structure of science and mathematics.
8. See Minsky (2006) for a discussion of common sense and artificial intelligence.
9. For a description of the cross-cultural Ultimatum game study, see Henrich et al. (2001). For a review of Ultimatum game results in industrial countries, see Camerer, Loewenstein, and Rabin (2003).
10. See Collins (2007). Another consequence of the culturally embedded nature of commonsense knowledge is that what it treats as “facts”—self-evident, unadorned descriptions of an objective reality—often turn out to be value judgments that depend on other seemingly unrelated features of the socio-cultural landscape. Consider, for example, the claim that “police are more likely to respond to serious than non-serious crimes.” Empirical research on the matter has found that indeed they do—just as common sense would suggest—yet as the sociologist Donald Black has argued, it is also the case that victims of crimes are more likely to classify them as “serious” when the police respond to them. Viewed this way, the seriousness of a crime is determined not only by its intrinsic nature—robbery, burglary, assault, etc.—but also by the circumstances of the people who are the most likely to be attended to by the police. And as Black noted, these people tend be highly educated professionals living in wealthy neighborhoods. Thus what seems to be a plain description of reality—serious crime attracts police attention—is, in fact, really a value judgment about what counts as serious; and this in turn depends on other features of the world, like social and economic inequality, that would seem to have nothing to do with the “fact” in question. See Black (1979) for a discussion of the conflation of facts and values. Becker (1998, pp. 133–34) makes a similar point in slightly different language, noting that “factual” statements about individual attributes—height, intelligence, etc.—are invariably relational judgments that in turn depend on social structure (e.g., someone who is “tall” in one context may be short in another; someone who is poor at drawing is not considered “mentally retarded” whereas someone who is poor at math or reading may be). Finally, Berger and Luckman (1966) advance a more general theory of how subjective, possibly arbitrary routines, practices, and beliefs become reified as “facts” via a process of social construction.
11. See Geertz (1975).
12. See Wadler (2010) for the story about the “no lock people.”
13. For the Geertz quote, see Geertz (1975, p. 22). For a discussion of how people respond to their differences of opinions, and an intriguing theoretical explanation of their failure to converge on a consensus view, see Sethi and Yildiz (2009).
14. See Gelman, Lax, and Phillips. (2010) for survey results documenting Americans’ evolving attitudes toward same-sex marriage.
15. It should be noted that political professionals, like politicians, pundits, and party officials, do tend to hold consistently liberal or conservative positions. Thus, Congress, for example, is much more polarized along a liberal-conservative divide than the general population (Layman et al. 2006). See Baldassari and Gelman (2008) for a detailed discussion of how political beliefs of individuals do and don’t correlate with each other. See also Gelman et al. (2008) for a more general discussion of common misunderstanding about political beliefs and voting behavior.
16. Le Corbusier (1923, p. 61).
17. See Scott (1998).
18. For a detailed argument about the failures of planning in economic development, particularly with respect to Africa, see Easterly (2006). For an even more negative viewpoint of the effect of foreign aid in Africa, see Moyo (2009), who argues that it has actually hurt Africa, not helped. For a more hopeful alternative viewpoint see Sachs (2006).
&nbs
p; 19. See Jacobs (1961, p. 4)
20. See Venkatesh (2002).
21. See Ravitch (2010) for a discussion of how popular, commonsense policies such as increased testing and school choice actually undermined public education. See Cohn (2007) and Reid (2009) for analysis of the cost of health care and possible alternative models. See O’Toole (2007) for a detailed discussion on forestry management, urban planning, and other failures of government planning and regulation. See Howard (1997) for a discussion and numerous anecdotes of the unintended consequences of government regulations. See Easterly (2006) again for some interesting remarks on nation-building and political interference, and Tuchman (1985) for a scathing and detailed account of US involvement in Vietnam. See Gelb (2009) for an alternate view of American foreign policy.
22. See Barbera (2009) and Cassidy (2009) for discussion of the cost of financial crises. See Mintzberg (2000) and Raynor (2007) for overviews of strategic planning methods and failures. See Knee, Greenwald, and Seave (2009) for a discussion of the fallibility of media moguls; and McDonald and Robinson (2009), and Sorkin (2009) for inside accounts of investment banking leaders whose actions precipitated the recent financial crisis. See also recent news stories recounting the failed AOL–Time Warner merger (Arango 2010), and the rampant, ultimately doomed growth of Citigroup (Brooker 2010).
23. Clearly not all attempts at corporate or even government planning end badly. Looking back over the past few centuries, in fact, overall conditions of living have improved dramatically for a large fraction of the world’s populations—evidence that even the largest and most unwieldy political institutions do sometimes get things right. How are we to know, then, that common sense isn’t actually quite good at solving complex social problems, failing no more frequently than any other method we might use? Ultimately we cannot know the answer to this question, if only because no systematic attempt to collect data on relative rates of planning successes and failures has ever been attempted—at least, not to my knowledge. Even if such an attempt had been made, moreover, it would still not resolve the matter, because absent some other “uncommon sense” method against which to compare it, the success rate of commonsense-based planning would be meaningless. A more precise way to state my criticism of commonsense reasoning, therefore, is not that it is universally “good” or “bad,” but rather that there are sufficiently many examples where commonsense reasoning has led to important planning failures that it is worth contemplating how we might do better.