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...
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.
Duncan J. Watts (born 1971) is an Australian researcher and a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directs the Human Social Dynamics group. He is also a past external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute and a former professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he headed the Collective Dynamics Group. He is author of the book Six Degrees: The Sc...
Duncan J. Watts (born 1971) is an Australian researcher and a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directs the Human Social Dynamics group. He is also a past external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute and a former professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he headed the Collective Dynamics Group. He is author of the book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age and Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer.
Historical explanations, in other words, are neither causal
explanations nor even really descriptions—at least not in the sense
that we imagine them to be. Rather, they are stories. As the
historian John Lewis Gaddis points out, they are stories that are
constrained by certain historical facts and other observable
evidence.12 Nevertheless, like a good story, historical explanations
concentrate on what’s interesting, downplaying multiple causes and
omitting all the things that might have happened but didn’t. As
with a good story, they enhance drama by focusing the action
around a few events and actors, thereby imbuing them with special
significance or meaning. And like good stories, good historical
explanations are also coherent, which means they tend to
emphasize simple, linear determinism... (查看原文)
邓肯·J.瓦茨 作者
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0 有用 athanos 2014-01-27 20:47:50
正如序言中自述的，通篇就是对社会学的一份辩护。讲得零零碎碎没有清晰逻辑严密的骨干，不过读读还是有些启发。
0 有用 Bunny焦虑 2015-03-29 18:23:01
算是对我自己有启发。作者以个人到群体到社会系统的层次分析了常识的错误，以及社会科学难做研究的原因。最直接的结果就是看过这本书的人对于几乎所有分析“XXX为什么成功”的文章都会持保留意见。
0 有用 耄 2013-11-08 17:21:21
"I knew it all along"的后见之明是最大的敌人。。。
0 有用 小土刀 2015-08-19 18:23:18
标准的畅销书风格，说的是马后炮的故事，提出一个并不新鲜的观点——知行合一。
0 有用 rm 2025-01-20 16:23:57 中国香港
中译本单独拿常识作为标题是不妥当的，从现在回看，common sense尽管关键，但也只是watts想讨论的开端，书里穿插了许多不同理论的开端：解释vs预测，常识的社会学解释，复杂系统，所以显得散乱