The Harvard Professor and bestselling author of Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of Our Nature joins us to reveal the power and perils of thinking alike. What do you know that everyone else knows? As a cognitive scientist, the ultimate subject of Steven Pinker’s fascination is how we think about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum. This awareness is called common knowledge – and it has a momentous impact on our social, political, and economic lives. Common knowledge can make sense of 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, and 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. Returning to How To Academy to explore these paradoxes of human behaviour, Harvard’s most renowned psychologist will invite us to understand the ways we try to get into each other’s heads – and the harmonies, hypocrisies, and outrages that result. Cognitive Scientist and Professor of Psychology at Harvard University 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, Enlightenment Now, 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.”

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