Understanding and Quantifying Common Sense: A Breakthrough Framework

Monday - February 26 2024, 11:39 UTC - 8 months ago

Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor Duncan Watts and Mark Whiting have developed a unique framework to quantify the concept of common sense at both the individual and collective levels. Their framework measures not just whether people agree on a claim, but also the depth and breadth of consensus. By understanding and measuring common sense, this tool has potential implications in various fields and provides a deeper understanding of this elusive concept.

Throughout the annals of human existence, the endurance and development of intricate communities have been largely reliant on the accumulation and application of knowledge. Of equal importance is the understanding of shared beliefs regarding what is considered true or untrue, often referred to as common sense. This concept plays a significant role in daily scenarios, such as following traffic regulations: Pedestrians instinctively steer clear of venturing into oncoming traffic, whereas motorists avoid using sidewalks as shortcuts to evade traffic jams.

However, deviations from these seemingly intuitive principles of interpersonal conduct remain prevalent. Despite the ubiquity of common sense, there is no unanimous consensus on what individuals collectively perceive as true or false.

Now, Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor Duncan Watts and Mark Whiting of the School of Engineering and Applied Science and Wharton School have developed a unique framework to quantify the concept of common sense. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers present a way to quantify common sense at both the individual and collective levels.

“Common sense is something that we all believe we possess, but rarely, if ever, are we forced to articulate which of our beliefs we consider ‘commonsensical’ or who else we think shares them,” Watts says. “What Mark and I set out to do was create a framework for answering these questions in a systematic, empirical way.” .

The researchers first tackled the challenge of defining and quantifying individual perceptions of common sense, which they termed “commonsensicality.” This involved assessing how much agreement exists among people regarding specific claims and how aware individuals are of others’ agreements on these claims.

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

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.

The researchers introduced this measure as the “pq common sense” metric, which has its basis on the idea of mapping out a network of beliefs shared among people—each person and each claim they believe in is connected—with the goal to find clusters or groups within this network where there’s a high level of agreement on certain claims.

“Here, ‘p’ represents a fraction of the population and ‘q’ a fraction of claims,” Whiting says. “The framework then calculates the proportion of claims q that are shared by a certain proportion of people p.” .

This is like examining a large group of people and figuring out what perceivably seems to be common among them, the researchers explain. The framework then computes the probability that these perceived shared beliefs are actually common.

The study also explored how certain factors might influence common sense and how it is perceived. For example, they looked at how education and socioeconomic status could potentially affect common sense beliefs. Interestingly, they found that both are not significant factors and do not play a significant role in shaping collective common sense.

The researchers also note the potential implications of this framework in different fields, such as marketing and advertising. This framework could help companies and marketers better understand and target specific common beliefs held by certain groups or individuals.

In conclusion, Watts and Whiting have developed a groundbreaking framework for understanding and quantifying common sense. By examining both individual and collective perceptions of common sense, this framework provides a deeper understanding of this often elusive concept and its impact on various aspects of society. From everyday scenarios to larger societal beliefs, common sense plays a crucial role in shaping our behaviors and decisions. With this new tool, we are now able to better understand and measure this fundamental aspect of human existence.