Duncan Watts

frequently been asked by curious outsiders what sociology has to say about the world that an intelligent person couldn’t have figured out on their own. It’s a reasonable question, but as the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld pointed out nearly sixty years ago, it also reveals a common misconception about the nature of social science

Why indeed.… But Lazarsfeld then reveals that all six of the “findings” were in fact the exact opposite of what the study actually found

way we make sense of the world can actually prevent us from understanding it

sore thumb. It would always be screwing up.8

Economists find this behavior surprising because it conflicts with their standard notion of economic rationality. Even a single dollar, the reasoning goes, is better than nothing at all, so from a strictly rational perspective, recipients ought to accept any offer above zero

is encoded in the social norms, customs, and practices of the world.10 According to Collins

liberals or conservatives, what they think about any one issue, like, say, abortion, has relatively little relation to what they believe about other issues, such as the death penalty or illegal immigration. In other words, we have the impression that our particular beliefs are all derived from some overarching philosophy

Where it does start to matter, however, is when we use common sense to solve problems that are not grounded in the immediate here and now of everyday life—problems that involve anticipating or managing the behavior of large numbers of people, in situations that are distant from us either in time or space. This may sound like an unlikely thing to do, but in fact we do it all the time. Whenever

The first type of error is that when we think about why people do what they do, we invariably focus on factors like incentives, motivations, and beliefs, of which we are consciously aware. As sensible as it sounds, decades of research in psychology and cognitive science have shown that this view of human behavior encompasses just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

behavior that is “emergent” in the sense that it cannot be understood solely in terms of its component parts. Faced with such complexity, however