Cover art for When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...
Published
Allen Lane, September 2025
ISBN
9780241618837
Format
Softcover, 384 pages
Dimensions
23.4cm × 15.3cm × 4cm

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

Not yet released
Due September 23, 2025.
Fast $7.95 flat-rate shipping!
Only pay $7.95 per order within Australia, including end-to-end parcel tracking.
100% encrypted and secure
We adhere to industry best practice and never store credit card details.
Talk to real people
Contact us seven days a week – our staff are here to help.

One of the world's greatest thinkers investigates the logic and psychology of common knowledge

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.

Related books