Together with Duncan Watts and others, I have developed an empirical method for quantifying common sense at the level of an individual or a collective.

Our paper has been published at PNAS, and the significance statement from the article is as follows:

Common sense, while often portrayed as universal, is paradoxically also often claimed not to exist. Here, we resolve this puzzling situation by introducing a formal methodology to empirically quantify common sense both at individual and collective levels. We then demonstrate the method with a dataset involving human raters evaluating claims. We show that common sense varies considerably across types of claims but aligns most closely with plainly worded, factual claims about physical reality; in contrast, does not vary much across different types of people. We also find limited presence of collective common sense, undermining universalist claims and supporting skeptics. Finally, we argue that quantifying common sense is useful both for applications in social science and AI.

The work has received attention at a few sources, which Altmetric summarize nicely: