Everything is Obvious. * Once You Know the Answer is a great book about how confident we are about things we couldn’t possibly know. My favorite part of the book is this study on whether rural or urban soldiers fared better in World War II. The results will surprise you.
Lazarsfeld was writing about The American Soldier, a then-recently published study of more than 600,000 servicemen that had been conducted by the research branch of the war department during and immediately after the Second World War. To make his point, Lazarsfeld listed six findings from the study that he claimed were representative of the report. For example, number two was that “Men from rural backgrounds were usually in better spirits during their Army life than soldiers from city backgrounds.” “Aha,” says Lazarsfeld’s imagined reader, “that makes perfect sense. Rural men in the 1940s were accustomed to harsher living standards and more physical labor than city men, so naturally they had an easier time adjusting. Why did we need such a vast and expensive study to tell me what I could have figured out on my own?”
Why indeed … But Lazarsfeld then reveals that all six of the “findings” were in fact the exact opposite of what the study actually found. It was city men, not rural men, who were happier during their Army life. Of course, had the reader been told the real answers in the first place she could just as easily have reconciled them with other things that she already thought she knew: “City men are more used to working in crowded conditions and in corporations, with chains of command, strict standards of clothing and social etiquette, and so on. That’s obvious!” But that’s exactly the point that Lazarsfeld was making. When every answer and its opposite appears equally obvious, then, as Lazarsfeld put it, “something is wrong with the entire argument of ‘obviousness.’ ”