Why is the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world?
Why did Facebook succeed when other social networking sites failed?
Did the surge in Iraq really lead to less violence? How much can
CEO’s impact the performance of their companies? And does higher
pay incentivize people to work hard?
If you think the answers to these questions are a matter of
common sense, think again. As sociologist and network science
pioneer Duncan Watts explains in this provocative book, the
explanations that we give for the outcomes that we observe in
life—explanation that seem obvious once we know the answer—are less
useful than they seem.
Drawing on the latest scientific research, along with a wealth of
historical and contemporary examples, Watts shows how common sense
reasoning and history conspire to mislead us into believing that we
understand more about the world of human behavior than we do; and
in turn, why attempts to predict, manage, or manipulate social and
economic systems so often go awry.
It seems obvious, for example, that people respond to incentives;
yet policy makers and managers alike frequently fail to anticipate
how people will respond to the incentives they create. Social
trends often seem to have been driven by certain influential
people; yet marketers have been unable to identify these
“influencers” in advance. And although successful products or
companies always seem in retrospect to have succeeded because of
their unique qualities, predicting the qualities of the next hit
product or hot company is notoriously difficult even for
experienced professionals.
Only by understanding how and when common sense fails, Watts
argues, can we improve how we plan for the future, as well as
understand the present—an argument that has important implications
in politics, business, and marketing, as well as in science and
everyday life.
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