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Peeling the Onion
Why we ask and answer the wrong questions
Questions without easy answers abound. But we humans hate that. Our brains like certainty. Tough, complex problems without clear solutions make us very unhappy indeed. In these situations, particularly where public pressure exists to find a fast and clean answer, we’re susceptible to a type of cognitive bias called substitution. Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, explains it this way, “If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, [our brains] will find a related question that is easier and will answer it.”
Since being sure of something is our preferred condition, our brains tend to do a lot to help us feel that way. We fight hard to preserve our version of events — even when we know we’re wrong. A story about onions is a good, if odd, example of this.
The onion story
In 1955 an onion farmer and commodities trader named Vince Kosuga saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He and his business partner, Sam Siegel, secretly bought up almost all of the onions in the U.S. But they didn’t stop at buying the onions already harvested, they wanted ALL of them — including the little baby onions still germinating in the ground. They made deals with farmers, a common practice then and now, to buy the farmer’s crops at a fixed price…
