Everything Is Obvious

What do you think explains the most famous painting in the world, why Facebook succeeded while other social networking sites failed, whether the surge in Iraq led to less violence, how much CEOs impact their companies' performance, and whether higher pay incentivizes people? If you think these questions have straightforward answers, sociologist Duncan Watts shows in this book that common sense reasoning and history conspire to mislead you. He presents his counterintuitive findings—and examples from politics and business—to show that our best attempts to understand human behavior often fail because we don't know what we don't know.