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In 1776, Thomas Paine, a traitorous Englishman living in the American colonies, published a seditious 47-page pamphlet. Called “Common Sense”, it became a best-seller. It argued that the colonies should demand independence from British rule. Later that year he did just that.
Appealing to common sense is a key part of politics, especially when an insurgent wants to distinguish himself from a supposedly isolated and out-of-touch elite. But in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mark Whiting and Duncan Watts, a pair of computational social scientists at the University of Pennsylvania, note that this idea has rarely been studied in rigor.
Two researchers set out to fix it. He begins by noting that the standard concept of common sense has a somewhat circular definition: common knowledge is a set of claims that sensible people agree with, and sensible people are those who have common sense.
To deal with such philosophical quandaries, the researchers turned to Mechanical Turk, a website run by Amazon, a large tech company, that allows people to post odd jobs. They recruited 2,046 human participants and asked them to rate 50 statements from a collection of 4,407 claims that could possibly be viewed as normal.
As common sense would predict, the researchers found that clearly worded claims relating to facts about the real world were most likely to be rated as demonstrating common sense (the “three parts of the triangle”). have arms”, for example, which is true by definition, or “avoid close contact with people who are sick”). The more abstract the claims, the less likely participants were to agree that they were common knowledge (“All men are created equal”; “Perception is the only source of knowledge”).
When they divided the claims by topic, the researchers found that claims related to technology and science were the most likely to be rated as common sense, while matters involving history and philosophy were the least likely. A respondent’s age, gender, income, and personal politics had little impact on what they considered common sense, although psychological measures of social cognition and the ability to consider one’s opinions did.
After examining individual opinions, the researchers looked at how common sense works in large groups. Here he got far less consent than expected. Only about 44% of the claims in the corpus were rated as common knowledge by at least 75% of respondents. A strict definition of common sense, which requires everyone to agree with a claim for it to count, reduces that number to just 6.6%. Where exactly a sensible cut-off lie is is a matter of debate. But truly “common” knowledge, it seems, is an elusive thing.
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© 2024, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under license. Original content can be found at www.economist.com
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Published: March 17, 2024, 07:09 PM IST
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