Written by one of the up-and-coming stars of sociology, "Everything Is Obvious" is a narrative-driven exploration of how our common sense often fails us as we make decisions and try to make sense of a complex world.

Reviews

"Mr. Watts, a former sociology professor and physicist who is now a researcher for Yahoo, has written a fascinating book that ranges through psychology, economics, marketing and the science of social networks."
- "The Wall Street Journal"

"It's about time a sociologist wrote an amazing and accessible book for a non-specialist audience. Everything Is Obvious*: Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts is that amazing book."
- "Inside Higher Ed
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"In this bold thesis, renowned network scientist Duncan J. Watts exposes the complex mechanics of judgement and proposes a radical new way of thinking about human behaviour."
-- Scott Wilson, The Fringe Magazine

"Common sense is a kind of bespoke make-believe, and we can no more use it to scientifically explain the workings of the social world than we can use a hammer to understand mollusks."
-- Nicholas Christakis, The New York Times
"""Everything is Obvious"" is engagingly written and sparkles with counter-intuitive insights. Its modesty about what can and cannot be known also compares favourably with other "big idea" books."
-- James Crabtree, comment editor Financial Times
"Every once in a while, a book comes along that forces us to re-examine what we know and how we know it. This is one of those books. And while it is not always pleasurable to realize the many ways in which we are wrong, it is useful to figure out the cases where our intuitions fail us."
- Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University, and "New York Times" bestselling author of "Predictably Irrational
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"A deep and insightful book that is a joy to read. There are new ideas on every page, and none of them is obvious!"
-Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of "Stumbling on Happiness"

"A brilliant account of why, for every hard question, there's a common sense answer that'so