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

Steven Pinker, one of the world's greatest thinkers and bestselng author of Enghtenment Now, The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Language Instinct, reveals the ower and erils of thinking ake

As a cognitive scientist, the timate subject of Steven Pinker’s fascination is how we think about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum. It sounds imossible, but Steven Pinker shows that we do it all the time. This awareness, which we exerience as something that is ubc or "out there," is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous imact on our social, otical, and economic ves.

Common knowledge, Pinker shows, can make sense of many of fe’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the osturing and retence of dilomacy, the erution of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel cture, the awkwardness of a first date. But eole 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 ke benign hyocrisy, veiled ibes and threats, sexual innuendo, and retending not to see the elehant in the room.

In exloring the aradoxes 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, hyocrisies, and outrages that rest.