When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .

Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life

By: Steven Pinker

Narrated by: Fred Sanders

From one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, a “fascinating” (Financial Times), 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 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 and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It’s also necessary for social coordination: everything from meeting up at a time and place 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 from out of nowhere, the eruption of cancel culture, and even the awkwardness of a first date.

Critic reviews

"Fred Sanders delivers this audiobook about metacognition with a perfect balance of erudition and approachability. Psychology professor Pinker describes how we understand our thoughts and how we know what others are thinking. To frame this discussion, he evokes the classic moment from the ‘90s television show “Friends,” the one in which Phoebe realizes “they don’t know we know they know!” That scene played for laughs, but Pinker is seriously applying this approach to the understanding of shared knowledge, as well as how we can be misunderstood. Social media is rife with examples of attempts at humor or sarcasm being taken out of context. Sanders doesn’t oversell these themes; he delivers Pinker’s ideas clearly, trusting that listeners will follow them."

This is a must for today!

I highly recommend this book. it's so needed for today and can be a huge help to anyone feeling the need to only find answers via social media. Take a listen and you will be glad that you did!

Fine book for people who seek to understand

Short review:
+ Quality of information is good.
+ The vast domain and impact of common knowledge was quite novel idea(for me), a new perspective or lens to look through and that is always very valuable and impactful.
+ The narrator was good.
- The book gets a bit bogged down in the middle: This is a common problem in more scientific/research based books because they need to give the evidence, describe the experiments, etc, when we already get the "gist of it" and want to get to the conclusions. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it makes me believe what is told is true, but often it's not too rivering in book format.
- I would've liked to hear more widely about common knowledge, like the beginning of the book described. Most of the book was purely about layers of common knowledge to which the title refers to. I think the writer has other books about common knowledge and this focused on the recursion/layers aspect. That's fine in and of itself, but what I was left wanting was wider but shallower look at all aspects of common knowledge; I don't want to read ten books to get the full picture, because I'm not studying this in university. That's not a fault of the book as much as it was a false expectation on my part.

Very interesting take-aways, probably could have read just the conclusion and been fine.

This is a worthwhile read. It isn’t the kind of book I will be handing out to family or friends for general consumption, but had very interesting conclusions. Steven Pinker is a great thinker and good writer, but the middle third of this book dragged. There were subtle differences in the types and depth of recursive mentalizing that likely felt very important to him as an academic, but don’t lend that much weight to his premise and were laid out in long drawn-out examples that were taxing to listen too. They may have been better if consumed in their original written form, but don’t lend themselves to audio. This is the type of book that you would gain almost as much from the concepts by only reading the introduction and conclusion, an save yourself hours if time. I am very glad I made it to the end, to hear the key takeaways, but it was a bit of a forced march from at least the mid-point to the end. I recommend this book, and the ideas are interesting, but be prepared to actively engage in the content as if it were a lecture you know you’ll only retain 40% of, and that is more than enough to make it useful.

Over my head

I do not have the intellectual ceiling to get all that I should from this book.

an interesting way to think about culture

an interesting way to think about culture. Also has some humorous examples . this review must contain 15 words