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 “superlatively gifted science writer” (The Times) 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 is necessary for coordination, for making arbitrary but complementary choices like driving on the right, using paper currency, and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It’s also necessary for social coordination: everything from rendezvousing at a time and place to speaking the same language to forming enduring relationships 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 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.

Pinker shows how the hidden logic of common knowledge can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretense of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date. Artists and humorists have long mined the intrigues of common knowledge, and Pinker liberally uses their novels, jokes, cartoons, films, and sitcom dialogues to illuminate social life’s tragedies and comedies. Along the way he answers questions like:

-Why do people hoard toilet paper at the first sign of an emergency?
-Why are Super Bowl ads dominated by crypto?
-Why, in American presidential primary voting, do citizens typically select the candidate they believe is preferred by others rather than their favorite?
-Why did Russian authorities arrest a protester who carried a blank sign?
-Why is it so hard for nervous lovers to say goodbye at the end of a phone call?
-Why does everyone agree that if we were completely honest all the time, life would be unbearable?

Consistently riveting in explaining the paradoxes of human behavior, and “one of the most insightful books…about what makes us human” (Bill Gates), 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.

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."

Very relevant

Again Pinker picks an extremely important topic and treats with the competence and intellectual honesty that we have come to expect from him.

The timeliness of an obscure domain of game theory

The narrator was… odd, but not BAD. A real reader would have made the experience more enjoyable, but I’m not sure I would have gleaned more. The fact that he was so utterly flat forced me to focus on the text more than I probably would have had it been otherwise. And the text is fantastic. Even if 1/3 to 1/2 of the book is a digression from the subject (and it is), everything was fascinating, well sourced, and brilliantly described. The weakest part was the conclusion, which I think is just flat out wrong. Despite the fact that we FEEL we live in a world of lies made MORE obfuscated by the internet, the opposite is obviously true. Today, for many, lies and myths are a choice instead of an inherited condition. This will become more true as time passes. It can feel like the opposite is true, but that is only because you are pricing cost of information in 20th and 21st century terms. The EXACT SAME FEELING must have hit like a bomb in Mainz in 1450 and radiated outward across the world.

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.

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.

Phenomenally deep insights

Clear examples pointing out behaviors and cognition we don’t even register but are clearly true; seems to explain a lot of our behavior more parsimoniously than I’ve previously thought possible