When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .
Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life
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- USD 14.99
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- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
From one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, a “fascinating” (Financial Times), brilliantly insightful work that explains how we think about each other’s thoughts about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum. It sounds impossible, but “superlatively gifted science writer” (The Times) Steven Pinker shows that we do it all the time. This awareness, which we experience as something that is public or “out there,” is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous impact on our social, political, and economic lives.
Common knowledge is necessary for coordination, for making arbitrary but complementary choices like driving on the right, using paper currency, and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It’s also necessary for social coordination: everything from rendezvousing at a time and place to speaking the same language to forming enduring relationships of friendship, romance, or authority. Humans have a sixth sense for common knowledge, and we create it with signals like laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech.
But people also go to great lengths to avoid common knowledge—to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can’t know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like benign hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and pretending not to see the elephant in the room.
Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretense of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date. Artists and humorists have long mined the intrigues of common knowledge, and Pinker liberally uses their novels, jokes, cartoons, films, and sitcom dialogues to illuminate social life’s tragedies and comedies. Along the way he answers questions like:
-Why do people hoard toilet paper at the first sign of an emergency?
-Why are Super Bowl ads dominated by crypto?
-Why, in American presidential primary voting, do citizens typically select the candidate they believe is preferred by others rather than their favorite?
-Why did Russian authorities arrest a protester who carried a blank sign?
-Why is it so hard for nervous lovers to say goodbye at the end of a phone call?
-Why does everyone agree that if we were completely honest all the time, life would be unbearable?
Consistently riveting in explaining the paradoxes of human behavior, and “one of the most insightful books…about what makes us human” (Bill Gates), When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… invites us to understand the ways we try to get into each other’s heads and the harmonies, hypocrisies, and outrages that result.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's not what everyone knows that counts but what everyone admits they know, according to this labyrinthine pop-sci treatise. Harvard cognitive psychologist Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature) recaps research—his own and others'—into common knowledge, the store of information that everyone knows and, crucially, is universally acknowledged to be true (as illustrated by the folktale "The Emperor's New Clothes," wherein everyone can see the ruler is naked, but it only becomes common knowledge when a naive child publicly declares it). Pinker analyzes how common knowledge enables the coordination of mutually beneficial outcomes: a public protest establishes the common knowledge of political dissatisfaction and allows protestors to take unified action, for example. Elsewhere, a chapter on cancel culture—Pinker has spoken out against its eruptions at Harvard—argues it's an attempt by ideologues to band together to protect common knowledge from infiltration by politically incorrect ideas. Pinker's discussions of these findings are intriguing if not earthshaking, but the scientific apparatus he assembles—replete with psych experiments into "recursive mentalizing," or "thinking about thoughts about thoughts"—can feel overblown and onerous. The result, in a lapse from Pinker's usual brilliance, is a taxing outing that yields mostly pedestrian insights.
