Steven Pinker

In The New Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage, 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.