Steven Pinker on Speculation Bubbles, Super Bowl Ads, and What Leaders Need to Know About Group Psychology

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As a leader, psychology is fundamental to your success - whether that means understanding consumer behavior, team dynamics, or even your own biases and blind spots. Harvard professor Steven Pinker says that an important phenomena to understand is that of common knowledge and its downstream effects. It's the idea that there is power in knowledge, but also power in knowing what other people know - and that when a large group of people know what others around them know, and vice versa, that's when major change can happen. He explains how common knowledge underlies meme stocks, the rise of crypto, meeting etiquette and the success of Super Bowl ads. Pinker wrote the new book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Deal's not just another payroll platform.
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0:13.1	Visit D-E-E-E-L.com slash HBR.
0:16.3	Thank you. I'm Adi Ignatius.
0:33.3	I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR Ideacast.
0:43.5	Thank you. I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR Ideacast. All right, so Allison, the more I think about leadership, the more I think that leading effectively is almost all about psychology.
0:51.5	Yeah, I can see what you mean.
0:53.3	You know, you need to understand consumers wants and needs, your employees wants and needs. Yeah, I can see what you mean. You know, you need to understand consumers wants
0:55.7	and needs, your employees wants and needs, your business partners wants and needs, really
1:00.9	anticipating everything that stakeholders might do or think. Yeah, exactly. I think successful
1:06.9	leaders need to think on multiple levels, both to cope with the complexity of their
1:11.1	jobs and to outthink their competition. So our guest today, Stephen Pinker, is all about the power
1:16.7	of knowledge, understanding what we know, what we don't know, and most importantly, whether or not
1:22.7	others know what we know. So I know that sounds very Donald Rumsfeldian, but there is power in understanding
1:28.9	all of this. Yeah, it does sound very meta, but Pinker is an expert in explaining very complex
1:36.2	topics in a way that feels understandable and applicable to our everyday lives. So I'm interested
1:42.0	to hear what he has to say. Absolutely. So Pinker is a professor
1:44.9	of psychology at Harvard University, author of the new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone
1:49.6	Knows, Common Knowledge, and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. It's a book that
1:54.9	helps explain everything from the power of Super Bowl ads, to the rise of cryptocurrency,
	...

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