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One of the most irritating things you can be told to do is “use your common sense.”
But the saying may not actually carry much weight, according to new research.
Experts have discovered that “common sense,” often claimed to be universal, is unique to each individual.
And what defines “common sense” actually differs considerably from person to person.
The team, from the University of Pennsylvania, collected 4,407 statements, each of which, at some point, had been claimed as common sense knowledge.
It may seem like common sense to some, but researchers have found that people couldn’t agree on whether “planet Earth is round” is considered common sense.
Examples included “Triangles have three sides”, “A battery cannot provide power forever”, “Alcohol consumption should be restricted for fans during sports games”, “Avoid close contact with sick people”, ” If you want to play a guitar you should take lessons’ and ‘Planet Earth is round’.
They then asked more than 2,000 people to rate how much they thought the statements made “common sense.”
They found that people’s perception of which statements represented “common sense” varied considerably.
And in general, relatively few statements satisfied the traditional definition of common sense, as “knowledge that is evident to everyone,” because not many people could agree on them.
The team said that, at most, only a small fraction of people agreed on which statements represented common sense.
The researchers found that people’s perception of whether statements like “A battery cannot provide power forever” were self-evident varied widely, and very few statements met common sense criteria.
Factors such as age and gender did not appear to influence how people perceived common sense, they added.
In a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers stated: “Common sense, although often presented as universal, is also paradoxically often claimed not to exist.
‘Here we resolve this perplexing situation by introducing a formal methodology to empirically quantify common sense at both the individual and collective levels.
“We show that common sense varies considerably across types of statements, but aligns most closely with factual, simply worded statements about physical reality.
“We also find a limited presence of collective common sense, which undermines universalist claims and supports skeptics.”