The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

by Tim Harford

There’s a sweet spot for curiosity: if we know nothing, we ask no questions; if we know everything, we ask no questions either. Curiosity is fueled once we know enough to know that we do not know.[7] Alas, all too often we don’t even think about what we don’t know. There’s a beautiful little experiment about our incuriosity, conducted by the psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil. They gave their experimental subjects a simple task: to look through a list of everyday objects such as a flush lavatory, a zipper, and a bicycle, and to rate their understanding of each object on a scale of one to seven.[8] After people had written down their ratings, the researchers would gently launch a devastating ambush. They asked the subjects to elaborate. Here’s a pen and paper, they would say; please write out your explanation of a flush lavatory in as much detail as you can. By all means include diagrams. It turns out that this task wasn’t as easy as people had thought. People stumbled, struggling to explain the details of everyday mechanisms. They had assumed that those details would readily spring to mind, and they did not. And to their credit, most experimental subjects realized that they’d been lying to themselves. They had felt they understood zippers and lavatories, but when invited to elaborate, they realized they didn’t understand at all. When people were asked to reconsider their previous one-to-seven rating, they marked themselves down, acknowledging that their knowledg...

Be curious!