When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage - Softcover

Pinker, Steven

Softcover

ISBN 10: 180206186X ISBN 13: 9781802061864

Publisher: Penguin, 2026

Synopsis

Steven Pinker, one of the world's greatest thinkers and bestselling author of Enlightenment Now, The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Language Instinct, reveals the power and perils of thinking alike

As a cognitive scientist, the ultimate subject of Steven Pinker’s fascination is how we think 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, Pinker shows, can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretence of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date. 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.

In exploring the paradoxes of human behaviour, 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.

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About this title

About the Author

Steven Pinker is an experimental cognitive scientist. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won many prizes for his research, teaching, and his eleven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Enlightenment Now. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, one of Foreign Policy's 'World's Top 100 Public Intellectuals' and Time's '100 Most Influential People in the World Today'.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 180206186X
• ISBN 13: 9781802061864
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384