Book talk - Steven Pinker on "When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..."
How many aspects of a person’s average day happen on autopilot? Think of situations where we think we already know the rules: driving on the correct side of the road, putting a stamp on a letter before mailing it, returning a smile, or responding with a nod. It’s given that everyone is on the same page. But is it? According to cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, there’s a complexity to the idea of “common knowledge” and exploring the logic behind these shared experiences can impact our social, political, and economic lives.
In his newest book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…, Pinker details how common knowledge is necessary for everyday functioning within a society. This ranges from practical measures like using the correct currency to make a purchase, to social applications like speaking the same language and gathering at agreed-upon times and places. These practices are part of how humans developed as creatures who crave coordination and cooperation, amplified by organic signals like laughter, tears, blushing, eye contact, and blunt speech.
But equally present in our modern society are deviations from these mutually beneficial practices — posturing, innuendo, overcorrecting out of awkwardness or avoidance, and fear of being an outlier. Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can help make sense of a wide range of questions about how we respond — for better or for worse — to these experiences.
From the patterns of financial bubbles and crashes, to understanding diplomacy and political dissent, to explaining the jokes of sitcom dialogues and social media cancel culture, Pinker posits that the paradoxes of human behavior come back to the ways we try to get into each other’s heads. When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… presents readers with a slew of everyday puzzles and invites them to ask more questions without assuming we already know what we’re all thinking.
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has won many prizes for his teaching, his research on language, cognition, and social relations, and his twelve books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Rationality. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”