43 pages • 1 hour read
Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. DubnerThink Like a Freak
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
Seeing a Problem Clearly
The book stresses the importance of seeing a problem clearly, since no one can solve a problem without knowing exactly what it is. This includes defining the problem correctly, asking the right questions to be able to solve it, finding its real cause, and looking through fresh eyes as children do. These all have to do with identifying a problem or discovering something related to it.
This theme is grouped into Chapters 3 to 5. With many problems, people make assumptions or accept conventional wisdom without questioning things for themselves. The case the authors point to here is education. When people think of improving children’s education, they automatically think of school and the changes that could be made there. However, research indicates that a child’s home environment—especially their parents—has a greater effect on education than anything related to teachers or the classroom (which is not to say that the latter have no effect).
Similarly, one must first ask the right questions on the path to defining a problem clearly. The story of Takeru Kobayashi, the competitive-eating champion, is instructive here. He destroyed the record for eating hot dogs at Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest his first time out, downing two dozen more than the previous record. The reason, the authors argue, is that he saw the problem more clearly than others by questioning how to eat hot dogs faster rather than how to eat more. By systematically testing new methods, he was able to answer his question and, in turn, the more conventional question of how to eat more.
Finding the root cause or root issue involved in a problem is key to solving it. The root cause of education problems may reside in the home rather than in school; the root issue of competitive eating is easting faster by making the food easier to eat. Another striking example of this is Barry Marshall’s discovery in the 1980s of the true cause of ulcers. This perfectly encapsulates the theme: Ulcers had long been treated but not cured because no one saw the problem clearly. Until Marshall, the root cause remained concealed. Only when H. pylori was identified as the cause could the cure (antibiotics) be applied.
Marshall’s work on ulcers illustrates another aspect of seeing a problem clearly: thinking like a child, which is the topic of Chapter 5. By this, Levitt and Dubner don’t mean being uninformed or naïve but rather viewing things with fresh eyes and avoiding assumptions. The medical community had assumed that bacteria could not survive in the acidic environment of the stomach, but Marshall did not accept this wisdom because his evidence seemed to run counter to it. He was not deterred by his peers’ derision, either, and he turned out to be right. The lesson here is to not be afraid of the obvious. Another aspect of thinking like a child is thinking small. Rather than trying to take on a large, complex issue all at once, focusing on one smaller aspect of it can be more effective and still make a difference. The example of providing schoolchildren with eyeglasses illustrates this well. While no overarching, systemic solution was found to improve education levels, the glasses definitely had a positive impact on a certain subset of students.
Shaping Peoples’ Behavior
The book also examines what shapes people’s behavior. Chapters 6 to 8 deal with aspects of this, which involve the other side of research: creating policy to deal with problems. A big part of thinking like a Freak is understanding how incentives work. Other types of behavior-shaping are game theory and persuasion. In each case, it’s important to realize how people actually behave, not how you think they ought to behave.
Incentives are highlighted in the authors’ previous books about freakonomics, in which they explain how incentives affected specific scenarios. In this book they examine the underlying thought process. To learn why people behave as they do, incentives are key. Understood and used correctly, they can help form public policy on important issues. Too often, however, people rely on what the authors call their “moral compass” to tell them how people should act. The truth is that moral incentives rarely work well in shaping behavior. Other types of incentives—such as money and herd mentality—are often more effective.
It’s important to remember how easily incentives can backfire. For instance, when people were stealing pieces of petrified wood at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, a researcher tried different approaches to discover the most effective deterrent. On some trails, the park scattered bits of the wood around and put up a sign based on a moral incentive. It informed visitors that 14 tons of wood a year were stolen, bit by bit, and asked them not to take any. Other trails had a similar amount of wood pieces but no signs. In the end, the trail with the sign had about three times as much wood stolen as the trail with no sign. It might have given people the idea to steal when they hadn’t thought of it on their own, or maybe people thought they’d better get a piece before it was all gone, or figured taking a tiny piece would make no difference given the large amount stolen. The point is, the intended incentive backfired, hence the authors’ exhortation to discover what truly motivates people in any given situation and not assume they will behave the way you’d like them to.
Some behavior needs to be shaped almost deceptively, as in the case of identifying criminals. Game theory is useful here because it anticipates what people will do. In simple terms, a lengthy application process for a job or admission to college is an example of this. If it requires time and effort, it becomes somewhat self-selecting; that is, people won’t apply on a whim, thereby saving you from screening out those who don’t take the application seriously. Persuasion is the third tool the authors discuss for shaping behavior. However, they argue that it’s the least effective—so much so that they discourage anyone from trying it. This runs counter to what many people believe about the power of a well-reasoned argument. The truth is that most people’s opinions are “likely based less on fact and logic than on ideology and herd thinking” (172).
Failure and Quitting
The book ends with the theme of failure and quitting. Although it only makes up one chapter, it’s an important part of thinking like a Freak because, like other aspects, it requires a fresh and realistic way of looking at things. The authors frame their discussion of quitting with anecdotes of Winston Churchill. They quote from a speech he gave at his old boarding school, in which he exhorted the boys to never give up no matter how small the stakes. This was in 1941, during the depths of World War II, a year after Churchill gave his famous speech to Parliament saying “we shall never surrender.” Both show how our culture praises people who stick with things through thick and thin, while casting quitters as losers.
Levitt and Dubner see quitting in a different light, however. Failure is an important method of gathering feedback and of learning—and sometimes accepting failure by quitting prevents further losses. Geoff Deane of Intellectual Ventures knew this when he celebrated failures in his firm’s lab. Knowing when to quit before wasting a lot of money was important if they were to get the chance to try again. Even higher stakes came in the decision whether to delay the launch of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. Pressing ahead despite warnings led to a terrible tragedy. Churchill, it turned out, knew his share of failure and quitting as well. Before he spoke the words quoted above, he had quit his political party and quit government entirely; he had also lost an election. All this may have been beneficial, the authors write: By the time Churchill gave his rousing wartime speeches, “he knew what was worth letting go, and what was not” (210).
