The Power of Common Knowledge: Steven Pinker on Language, Norms, and Punishment
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 23 September 2025
⏱️ 96 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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. 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.
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. 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." He has won many prizes for his teaching, his research on language, cognition, and social relations, and his twelve books. His new book is 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 | You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show. |
| 0:15.4 | All right, hey everybody, it's Michael Shermer. It's Michael Shermer. It's time for the episode of The Michael Shermer Show. We have a legendary returning champion to the show, Stephen Pinker. You all know him, but I'm going to give him a proper introduction anyway. He is the John Stone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He's an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and one of times 100 most influential people |
| 0:40.1 | in the world today. He's won many prizes for his teaching, his research on language, |
| 0:45.4 | cognition, and social relations, and his 12 books, which include, here we go, how the mind works. |
| 0:52.1 | I have him right here from my shelf, and just so you can see, we are all aging properly. |
| 0:58.0 | The language instinct, the blank slate. |
| 1:02.0 | One of my favorites of yours, Steve. |
| 1:04.0 | The stuff of thought. |
| 1:06.0 | Here I have, most of these are first editions, actually. |
| 1:08.0 | This one's the first edition signed the better angels |
| 1:11.0 | of our nature okay i'm piling up here uh enlightenment now okay and a sense of style if you want |
| 1:19.9 | to learn how to be a good writer like pinker read his book on how to do it his previous great book |
| 1:24.8 | for which he was on the show for, Rationality and the New One. |
| 1:28.9 | When Everyone Knows, That Everyone Knows, Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Power, |
| 1:35.8 | Oh, sorry, Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. |
| 1:40.1 | What a great cover, by the way, Steve. |
| 1:41.6 | I love that. The thought bubbles in the thought bubbles. |
| 1:44.5 | I take credit for the idea, although, of course, not for the implementation, where a very talented designer hired by Skripner made it. |
| 1:54.0 | Oh, nice. |
| 1:55.1 | Yeah, you know, it's interesting, just since we're fellow authors here of your different book covers that I just held up. |
| 1:59.7 | The new ones, the last two are very different from the previous ones. It's interesting how designers kind of go in |
| 2:06.0 | trends for book covers. Yeah, there is some, they tell us that there's some dark art to what |
... |
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