An uncommon sense

Common sense: what is it? Where does it come from? What is it good for?

I don’t really have profound or learned answers to any of these questions, yet all my life I’ve held it in the highest regard. Give me common sense over a zillion PhDs any day. It’s common sense that will get you out of trouble with persnickety cars and plumbing most of the time. It will give you the capacity to understand small children and invoicing.

But common sense is less common than we think. Blame the University of Pennsylvania.

Because I revered common sense, I thought it was because I was close to it. A common mistake. The people at U Penn have other ideas.

One day, the Cats’ Father found me low and sullen and, knowing my passion for quizzes, sent me the link for their online common-sense test – part of their larger study on it.

My result was the truly incredible zero per cent. As in: can we credit this?

According to the survey, my beliefs are not like those of other people and it declared that I have no understanding of how people perceive the world.

This could not be true. Not so absolutely. Surely, I know something. This test is saying that my comprehension of the world, and of how I think others agree with my view, is none at all.

I found the article from which the Cats’ Father (who I now believe is an agent of chaos and my truest nemesis) derived the test and found that a page that I mistook for a random advertisement was indeed part of the questionnaire. Now, this is not an excuse, but it’s important. I believe everyone in the world woke up and decided to do this survey. The site was running in a manner best described as less-than-optimal.

The section I missed, understandably, was maths. What could maths have to do with anything? Maths is the least common sense money can buy. Too besides, as with my entire mathematical career, even if there’d been a cheat sheet, I still would not have had any answers.

But what of my excellently thought-out answers for everything else?

Well, here’s the thing. I know not what you think common sense is or ought to be, but I’ve always associated it with a practical, pragmatic kind of knowledge. A kind of baseline knowing. These are the things we agree to have at least some grasp of if we are to function in our world.

We already know that my fragment of agreement with Prof Duncan Watts and Mark Whiting, authors of the study (and test) did nothing to help my score. What Watts and Whiting are looking at is how we share opinions or perceptions on certain matters and the extent to which we’re aware that others may share those ideas.

They are looking for, in short, our common ground of understanding. Our very many Venn diagrams and where they intersect. I’m the little circle off to the side.

In The Commonalities of Common Sense, published in Penn Today (where else?), Nathi Magubane bravely tries to make sense of common sense by talking to the people who want to tell us about it.

“Essentially, we sought to measure not just whether people agree on a claim but also their awareness of said shared agreement,” Whiting, first author of the paper, says. “It’s an approach that moves beyond simply tallying up agreements to understanding the depth and breadth of consensus.”

Magubane continues: “The second aspect was collective common sense, a concept focusing on shared beliefs across different groups. This measure helped the researchers gauge the extent of common beliefs within groups, and, interestingly, they found that the larger the group the fewer common beliefs are held.”

So, just to be clear, this is about sense that is common to us. That is, it’s stuff we can agree we know, and what we know is the same thing. And then, if someone asks us, we can say, “Sure, lots of other people are doing the exact same kind of knowing that I do.”

The day I did the quiz, another brave soldier, Emma Beddington of the UK Guardian, had just posted her war story about the common-sense haves and have-nots. She got 53 per cent on her first try and was shell-shocked.

I would have at least had the grace to think I was normal. I think Emma is the reason the site was in a state and kept stalling.

But you should try it. Go find out how common your sense is.