Description: "From one of the world's most celebrated intellectuals, a 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, 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"--
Brief description: Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has won many prizes for his teaching, his research on language, cognition, and social relations, and his twelve books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Rationality. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and one of Time's "100 Most Influential People in the World Today."
Review Quotes: "Reading Steven Pinker is always a delight. Each book gives you deep insight into things previously unseen, which then bathes the world we thought we knew in a new light. In When Everyone Knows, Pinker shows us that the transition from various forms of private knowledge to common knowledge is the key cognitive tool for understanding when and how people coordinate to bring about sudden massive change--for better and for worse. If Pinker's ideas become common knowledge, we'll be far better equipped to handle the massive disruptions already arriving in our hyper-networked world."
--Jonathan Haidt, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Anxious Generation and coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind