OPINION14 November 2017
Knowing a little
x Sponsored content on Research Live and in Impact magazine is editorially independent.
Find out more about advertising and sponsorship.
Most decisions we make involve educated guesswork and social cognition – we do the best we can, given our constraints writes Rory Sutherland.
A few weeks ago, a good friend of mine was asked to write the questions for his golf club quiz. After hours of tortuous work, he submitted a list of proposed questions to the organiser.
‘Which singer-songwriter hit Justin Bieber in the mouth with a sand wedge?’ The organiser looked down page after page of questions like this. “These are far too difficult. We’ll have whole rounds where no-one scores anything.”
My friend tried again, this time with easier questions. “Too easy, ” he was told. “We need to challenge people a bit more than this.”
He tried a compromise. He went back to the difficult questions and he sprinkled them with little clues. For instance, he now wrote ‘Which ginger-haired singer-songwriter hit Justin Bieber in the mouth with a sand wedge?’
Now, even if you hadn’t heard of the Ed Sheeran incident, you had a chance. The event went very well.
The following week I was watching University Challenge ...