When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...

Resumen del libro

'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.

Biografía del autor

Steven Pinker (Montreal, 1954) es un prominente psicólogo experimental americano, científico cognitivo y un popular escritor, conocido por su defensa enérgica y de gran alcance de la psicología evolucionista y de la teoría computacional de la mente.<br> Steven Pinker es catedrático del Harvard College y del Johnstone Family en la Universidad de Harvard.<br> Realizó sus estudios en la Universidad McGill y en la Universidad de Harvard, donde obtuvo su doctorado. Es miembro de la Academia Americana de las Artes y las Ciencias, y de la Asociación Psicológica Americana.<br> Galardonado con varios premios y reconocimientos, es autor de varios libros, entre ellos, La tabla rasa, El mundo de las palabras, Los ángeles que llevamos dentro y En defensa de la Ilustración, todos publicados por Paidós.