“An expository masterpiece.  Steven Pinker explains, with beautiful clarity, how common knowledge is critical to successful human interaction.”
- Eric Maskin, Nobel Laureate in Economics and Professor at Harvard University

From one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, a brilliantly insightful work that explains how we think about each other’s thoughts about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum. It sounds impossible, but 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 meeting up at a time and place or speaking the same language to forming enduring bonds 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 may strive 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 seem to 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.

Consistently riveting in explaining the paradoxes of human behavior, 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.

AVAILABLE AT:






 

Praise for WHEN EVERYONE KNOWS THAT EVERYONE KNOWS…

“When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…is one of the most insightful books I’ve read about what makes us human and how we understand each other. It changed how I think about the interactions I have, and I bet it will do the same for you.”
- Bill Gates

“Reading Steven Pinker is always a delight. It's not just that he gives us the most beautiful science writing. It's also that each book gives you deep insight into things previously unseen, which then bathes the world we thought we knew in a new light. In When Everyone Knows, Pinker shows us that the transition from various forms of private knowledge to common knowledge is the key cognitive tool for understanding when and how people coordinate to bring about sudden massive change—for better and for worse. You can't understand our social and political worlds, or markets and economies, without this tool. If Pinker's ideas become common knowledge, we'll be far better equipped to handle the massive disruptions already arriving in our hyper-networked world.”
- Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at the NYU-Stern School of Business and #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Anxious Generation and coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind

“Think you know what others think about what you are thinking?  It turns out you’re probably wrong. And thanks to When Everyone Knows, now we know why. Once you read this book, you’ll never view human behavior quite the same way again.”
- Jonah Berger, New York Times bestselling author of Contagious and The Catalyst

“An expository masterpiece.  Steven Pinker explains, with beautiful clarity, how common knowledge is critical to successful human interaction.”
- Eric Maskin, Nobel Laureate in Economics and Professor at Harvard University

“A masterful look behind the curtain at the calculations that propel us forward. With his brilliant knack for exposing what we take for granted, celebrated cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker explores, among many phenomena, our very human tendency to reveal information strategically, only letting others see what we want them to see.  It is a game we all play, wagering bets on how much of what a person is saying tallies with what they’re thinking.  Sometimes our bets help us capture what we seek; at other times, we’re proven disastrously wrong. In holding up a mirror to our mental workings, Pinker teaches us how to better turn the odds in our favor.”
- Annie Duke, bestselling author of Thinking in Bets and How to Decide

“A lively exposition of one of the most important and basic concepts in game theory, and the surprising ways it plays out in human affairs.”
- Robert J. Aumann, Nobel Laureate in Economics and Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

"Insight packed. With brisk authority, Pinker shows that a key aspect of being human, sociality, depends on a mutual understanding of intentions, which allows us to make sense of responses like laughing and blushing and phenomena as various as myth-making and online cancel culture.”
- Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Laureate in Economics and New York Times bestselling author of Why Nations Fail

“With his characteristic wit and clarity, Steven Pinker has written a brilliant exploration of common knowledge as the glue that holds society together—and how its lack can tear the social fabric apart. Part game theory, part philosophy, part psychology, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… is Pinker doing what he does best: explaining the world in rational terms that seem self-evident the moment you hear them. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the rules of the world in which we live—and how to extract maximum value from them to make it a world worth living in.”
- Maria Konnikova, New York Times bestselling author of The Biggest Bluff