Chapter1-013- I Knew It All Along

I Knew It All Along: Is Social Psychology Simply Common Sense?

Do social psychology’s theories provide new insight into the humancondition? Or do they only describe the obvious?

Many of the conclusions presented in this book may have alreadyoccurred to you, for social psychological phenomena are all around you. We constantlyobserve people thinking about, influencing, and relating to one another. Itpays to discern what a facial expression predicts, how to get someone to dosomething, or whether to regard another as friend or foe. For centuries,philosophers, novelists, and poets have observed and commented on socialbehavior.

Does this mean that social psychology is just common sense in fancywords? Social psychology faces two contradictory criticisms: first, that it istrivial because it documents the obvious; second, that it is dangerous becauseits findings could be used to manipulate people.

We will explore the second criticism in Chapter 7. For the moment,let’s examine the first objection.

Do social psychology and the other social sciences simply formalizewhat any amateur already knows intuitively? Writer Cullen Murphy (1990) tookthat view: “Day after day social scientists go out into the world. Day after daythey discover that people’s behavior is pretty much what you’d expect.” Nearlya half-century earlier, historian Arthur Schlesinger（Schle·sing·er ˈshlā-ziŋ-ər ˈshle-sin-jər）, Jr. (1949), reacted with similar scorn to social scientists’ studies ofAmerican World War II soldiers. Sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld (1949) reviewedthose studies and offered a sample with interpretive comments,a few of which I paraphrase:

1. Better-educated soldiers suffered more adjustment problems thandid less educated soldiers. (Intellectuals were less prepared for battlestresses than street-smart people.)

2. Southern soldiers coped better with the hot South Sea Islandclimate than did Northern soldiers. (Southerners are more accustomed to hotweather.)

3. White privates were more eager for promotion than were Blackprivates. (Years of oppression take a toll on achievement motivation.)

4. Southern Blacks preferred Southern to Northern White officers.(Southern officers were more experienced and skilled in interacting withBlacks.)

As you read those findings, did you agree that they were basicallycommon sense? If so, you may be surprised to learn that Lazarsfeld went on tosay, “Every one of these statements is the direct opposite of what was actuallyfound.” In reality, the studies found that less-educated soldiers adapted morepoorly. Southerners were not more likely than northerners to adjust to atropical climate. Blacks were more eager than Whites for promotion, and soforth. “If we had mentioned the actual results of the investigation first [asSchlesinger experienced], the reader would have labeled these ‘obvious’ also.”

One problem with common sense is that we invoke it after we know thefacts. Events are far more “obvious” and predictable in hindsight thanbeforehand. Experiments reveal that when people learn the outcome of anexperiment, that outcome suddenly seems unsurprising—certainly less surprisingthan it is to people who are simply told about the experimental procedure andthe possible outcomes (Slovic & Fischhoff, 1977).

Likewise, in everyday life we often do not expect something tohappen until it does. Then we suddenly see clearly the forces that brought theevent about and feel unsurprised. Moreover, we may also misremember our earlierview (Blank & others, 2008). Errors in judging the future’s foreseeabilityand in remembering our past combine to create hindsight bias (also called theI-knew-it-all-along phenomenon ).

Thus, after elections or stock market shifts, most commentators findthe turn of events unsurprising: “The market was due for a correction.” Afterthe widespread flooding in New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina in2005, it seemed obvious that public officials should have anticipated thesituation: Studies of the levees’ vulnerabilityhad been done. Many residents did not own cars and were too poor to affordtransportation and lodging out of town. Meteorologic assessmentof the storm’s severity clearly predicted an urgent need to put security andrelief supplies in place. As the Danish philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard （Kier·ke·gaardˈkir-kə-ˌgär(d)）put it, “Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.”

If hindsight bias is pervasive, you may now be feeling that youalready knew about this phenomenon. Indeed, almost any conceivable result of apsychological experiment can seem like common sense— after you know the result.

You can demonstrate the phenomenon yourself. Take a group of peopleand tell half of them one psychological finding and the other half the oppositeresult. For example,

tell half as follows: Social psychologists have foundthat, whether choosing friends or falling in love, we are most attracted topeople whose traits are different from our own. There seems to be wisdom in theold saying “Opposites attract.”

Tell the other half: Social psychologists have found that, whetherchoosing friends or falling in love, we are most attracted to people whosetraits are similar to our own. There seems to be wisdom in the old saying“Birds of a feather flock together.”

Ask the people first to explain the result. Then ask themto say whether it is “surprising” or “not surprising.” Virtually all will finda good explanation for whichever result they were given and will say it is “notsurprising.”

Indeed, we can draw on our stockpile of proverbs to makealmost any result seem to make sense. If a social psychologist reports thatseparation intensifies romantic attraction, John Q. Public responds, “You getpaid for this? Everybody knows that ‘absence makes theheart grow fonder.’” Should it turn out that separation weakens attraction,John will say, “My grandmother could have told you, ‘Out of sight, out ofmind.’”

Karl Teigen (1986) must have had a few chuckles when heasked University of Leicester (England) students to evaluate actual proverbsand their opposites. When given the proverb “Fear is stronger than love,” mostrated it as true. But so did students who were given its reversed form, “Loveis stronger than fear.” Likewise, the genuine proverb “He that is fallen cannothelp him who is down” was rated highly; but so too was “He that is fallen canhelp him who is down.” My favorites, however, were two highly rated proverbs:“Wise men make proverbs and fools repeat them” (authentic) and its made-upcounterpart, “Fools make proverbs and wise men repeat them.” For more duelingproverbs, see “Focus On: I Knew It All Along.”

The hindsight bias creates a problem for many psychologystudents. Sometimes results are genuinely surprising (for example, that Olympicbronze medalists take more joy in their achievement than do silver medalists).More often, when you read the results of experiments in your textbooks, thematerial seems easy, even obvious. When you later take a multiple choice teston which you must choose among several plausible conclusions, the task maybecome surprisingly difficult. “I don’t know what happened,” the befuddledstudent later moans. “I thought I knew the material.”

The I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon can have unfortunateconsequences. It is conducive to arrogance—an overestimation of our ownintellectual powers. Moreover, because outcomes seem as if they should havebeen foreseeable, we are more likely to blame decision makers for what are inretrospect “obvious” bad choices than to praise them for good choices, whichalso seem “obvious.”

Starting after the morning of 9/11 and working backward,signals pointing to the impending disaster seemed obvious. A U.S. Senateinvestigative report listed the missed or misinterpreted clues (Gladwell,2003), which included the following. The CIA knew that al Qaeda operatives hadentered the country. An FBI agent sent a memo to headquarters that began bywarning “the Bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort byOsama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civilianaviation universities and colleges.” The FBI ignored that accurate warning andfailed to relate it to other reports that terrorists were planning to useplanes as weapons. The president received a daily briefing titled “Bin LadenDetermined to Strike Inside the United States” and stayed on holiday. “The dumbfools!” it seemed to hindsight critics. “Why couldn’t they connect the dots?”

But what seems clear in hindsight is seldom clear on thefront side of history. The intelligence community is overwhelmed with“noise”—piles of useless information surrounding the rare shreds of usefulinformation. Analysts must therefore be selective in deciding which to pursue,and only when a lead is pursued does it stand a chance of being connected toanother lead. In the six years before 9/11, the FBI’s counterterrorism unitcould never have pursued all 68,000 uninvestigated leads. In hindsight, the fewuseful ones are now obvious.

In the aftermath of the 2008 world financial crisis, itseemed obvious that government regulators should have placed safeguards againstthe ill-fated bank lending practices. But what was obvious in hindsight wasunforeseen by the chief American regulator, Alan Greenspan, who found himself“in a state of shocked disbelief” at the economic collapse.

We sometimes blame ourselves for “stupid mistakes”—perhapsfor not having handled a person or a situation better. Looking back, we see howwe should have handled it. “I should have known how busy I would be at thesemester’s end and started that paper earlier.” But sometimes we are too hardon ourselves. We forget that what is obvious to us now was not nearly soobvious at the time.

Physicians who are told both a patient’s symptoms and thecause of death (as determined by autopsy) sometimes wonder how an incorrectdiagnosis could have been made. Other physicians, given only the symptoms,don’t find the diagnosis nearly so obvious (Dawson & others, 1988). Wouldjuries be slower to assume malpractice if they were forced to take a foresight rather than a hindsight perspective?

What do we conclude—that common sense is usually wrong?Sometimes it is. At other times, conventional wisdom is right—or it falls onboth sides of an issue: Does happiness come from knowing the truth, or frompreserving illusions? From being with others, or from living in peacefulsolitude? Opinions are a dime a dozen. No matterwhat we find, there will be someone who foresaw it. (Mark Twain jested that Adam was the only person who, when sayinga good thing, knew that nobody had said it before.) But which of the manycompeting ideas best fit reality? Research can specify the circumstances underwhich a common-sense truism is valid.

Thepoint is not that common sense is predictably wrong. Rather, common sense usuallyis right— after the fact. We therefore easily deceive ourselves into thinking thatwe know and knew more than we do and did. And that is precisely why we needscience to help us sift reality from illusion and genuine predictions from easyhindsight.