The Observer Book Club with Steven Pinker

Invited experts

James Harding

Editor-in-Chief

Steven Pinker

Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University

Join us for an illuminating Observer Book Club evening with Steven Pinker, Harvard professor, renowned cognitive scientist and bestselling author, as he delves into his provocative new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage. Pinker’s lifelong fascination is with how we think about each other’s thoughts. In this groundbreaking work, he explores the concept of common knowledge: the awareness that something is not only known, but known to be known by all - and how it shapes the very fabric of our social, political and economic worlds. 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. Pinker invites us to explore the paradoxes of human behavior: Why do we sometimes crave shared understanding, yet at other times recoil from it? How do harmonies, hypocrisies, and collective outrages emerge from our efforts to get inside each other’s heads? What hidden rules govern our public and private lives… and what does this reveal about the deepest mysteries of human nature?