Steven Pinker with Steve Scher

From the patterns of financial bubbles and crashes, to understanding diplomacy and political dissent, to explaining the jokes of sitcom dialogues and social media cancel culture, Pinker posits that the paradoxes of human behavior come back to the ways we try to get into each other’s heads. When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… presents readers with a slew of everyday puzzles and invites them to ask more questions without assuming we already know what we’re all thinking.

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.”

Steve Scher is a writer, broadcaster, and interviewer. His children’s book, The Moon Bear, came out in 2022. Over his 28 years on local public radio, he won awards for his incisive coverage of public affairs, breaking news and his beyond-the-headlines approach to issues. His in-depth interviews with award-winning authors, political leaders, scientists, artists and active citizens are noted for their intelligence and sensitivity. Most summers since 2009, he has taught a Communications Department class on interviewing at the University of Washington.

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