Everything is obvious

Common sense works well for everyday situations, but Duncan J. Watts argues that it fails when the world becomes too intricate to reason about through intuition alone. The book is also titled Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer.

Watts, a sociologist and network scientist who has worked at Microsoft Research and Columbia University, draws on several fields to examine why people believe things are obvious after the fact. He looks at why some songs, books and products become popular, how markets and economies behave, and how people deceive themselves about their own judgments and motives.

The result is written for general readers interested in how society works and why our explanations of human behavior so often feel right in hindsight but prove unreliable.