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1-Page Summary of Everything Is Obvious

Overview

Common sense is what you use every day to guide your decisions. It’s the collection of observations and experiences that we accumulate as we go through life. However, it can sometimes be a bad strategy for making big decisions because it can lead us astray. Here are some examples where common sense fails people, along with tips on how to avoid those mistakes in the future.

A certain fashion company found a way to make money by ignoring the predictions about how people will dress in the future. The Mona Lisa might not be as famous and popular if it were painted differently, but because of its fame, many copies were made.

This passage will help you learn about the differences between cultures, as well as why Austrians are so willing to donate their internal organs.

Finally, you will learn how luck affects our lives and why it’s important to understand that. You will also gain some knowledge on how to predict the future and interpret what is happening in the present.

Big Idea #1: What we consider to be “common sense” varies strongly across societies.

How do you know that it’s a bad idea to hop on the subway without pants? Or that it’s wrong to cheat someone out of their money? The answer is common sense, which means we all share those beliefs. It can define everything from knowing how to act at an escalator (stand on the right) to treating people fairly.

However, common sense is not the same in other cultures.

For example, the way people play a game called the ultimatum game is significantly different across cultures. In this game, one player proposes how to divide $100 between himself and another person. The other person can choose whether or not to accept that offer. If he rejects it, both players get nothing. Studies have found that in Western societies, most people made what they considered a fair offer of about 50% for themselves and 50% for the other player; offers less than 30% were usually rejected by the second player.

While the Ultimatum Game is usually played with people from Western cultures, when members of the Machiguenga tribe in Peru were asked to play, they tended to offer 25% of their total amount and few offers were rejected.

The Au and Gau tribes of Papua New Guinea preferred to make offers that were better than 50–50, but they were rejected just as often.

This shows us that common sense is not a universal truth, but instead a product of our society. This idea matters because we often use common sense to solve societal problems, and it may not always work as well as we expect it to.

Big Idea #2: Using common sense to make judgments can have disastrous consequences when dealing with major societal problems.

Common sense is great for personal decisions, but it doesn’t work as well when dealing with larger issues that affect society.

The decisions of decision makers are often based on common sense, which results in huge mistakes.

Urban planning is one example of this. It’s based on what people think will work, not on scientific methods. People who do urban planning often make mistakes because they don’t really know how to plan for a city. One famous mistake was the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, which were designed by architects and planners who thought it would help people if they had their own apartments instead of living in crowded tenements with shared bathrooms and kitchens.

Despite the assumptions of those who believed that replacing slums with high-rise housing projects would improve society, these new buildings ended up being more dilapidated and poverty-stricken than their predecessors. How can we be so blind to the failings of common sense in solving societal problems?