Common Sense

The other day, I was discussing someone and the description of them came up - they have no common sense.

But what is common sense?

Well, it reflects a lot of things. I've made a bit of a list, but it is by no means exhaustive.

1. Attention to the saliency of stimuli - A person with common sense will be able to observe something or someone and recognize which aspects of the stimulus are important and s/he should attend to. This is important because people will focus discretely on these tasks and they will be able to learn from these tasks.

2. The use of modeling as a technique to learn new skills. A person with common sense will learn by observing models in his/her environment. A person with common sense will also pay attention to all models - not just the ones that have a skill that they need to learn immediately, but those that have skills which they believe will be needed in the future.

3. A wait-and-task-analyze approach - A person with common sense will be able to delay resopnding to a particular situation, and analyze steps that will need to be accomplished. This can also be described as planning your actions. As part of this technique, a person with common sense will not only task analyse how to solve immediate problems, but also how to solve future problems and problems that are not even distally present (for instance, a person with common sense may have task analysed, in a rudimentary sense, what to do in case of a natural disaster)

4. A theory-of-mind. A person with common sense will be able to project in the future how s/he will feel, how others will feel and how others will perceive them as feeling and being (for instance, a person with common sense will be able to determine how the model is feeling, how she or he feels towards the model and how others may perceive him if he performs the activities the model just completed.