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

Steven Pinker

ISBN 10: 0241618835 / ISBN 13: 9780241618837

Published by Penguin Books Ltd (UK) Sep 2025, 2025

About this Item

Neuware - 'One of the most insightful books I've read about what makes us human and how we understand each other' Bill GatesSteven 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.

Seller Inventory # 9780241618837

Bibliographic Details

• Title: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows. : Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd (UK) Sep 2025
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241618835
• ISBN 13: 9780241618837
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 233W x 153H x 34D millimeters 233 millimeters width by 153 millimeters height by 34 millimeters depth
• Weight: 476 grams

About this title

Synopsis

'One of the most insightful books I’ve read about what makes us human and how we understand each other' Bill Gates

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.

About the Author

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, Enlightenment Now, 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.”