Everything Is Obvious Once You Know The Answer

Andy Grogan-Kaylor

From a Study of Over 600,000 Returned Soldiers After World War II

“1. Better educated men showed more psycho-neurotic symptoms than those with less education.

  1. Men from rural backgrounds were usually in better spirits during their Army life than soldiers from city backgrounds.
  1. Southern soldiers were better able to stand the climate in the hot South Sea Islands than Northern soldiers.”

Everything is Obvious

“We have in these examples a sample list of the simplest type of interrelationships which provide the ‘bricks’ from which our empirical social science is being built.

But why, since they are so obvious, is so much money and energy given to establish such findings?

Would it not be wiser to take them for granted and proceed directly to a more sophisticated type of analysis?

This might be so except for one interesting point about the list.

Every one of these statements is the direct opposite of what actually was found.

Poorly educated soldiers were more neurotic than those with high education;…

Southerners showed no greater ability than Northerners to adjust to a tropical climate; …

Citation

Lazarsfeld, P. F. (1949). The American Soldier-An Expository Review. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 13(3), 377–404. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2745717