How the study defined common sense

A 2024 study asked 2,046 people to judge 4,407 statements and guess what “most people” would say about each one. For every statement, they calculated two things:

1. How much people actually agree.
2. How well people can predict that agreement.

On that definition, a statement only counts as “common sense” when most people agree and know that others agree. When they ran the numbers, they found that outside of basic physical facts, only small groups agree on small slices of reality. That kills the idea of a single shared instinct.