Steven Pinker: The Elephant, the Emperor, and the Matzo Ball

thank you very much when the little boy said the emperor was naked he wasn't telling anyone anything that they didn't already know they could see the Emperor was naked with their own eyeballs but he was changing the state of their knowledge nonetheless because at that point everyone knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew that everyone else knew the emperor was naked and that changed their relationship with the Emperor allowing them to challenge him with their laughter the Emperor's New Clothes refer is a story about the distinction between shared knowledge and common knowledge in share knowledge a knows X and B knows X in common knowledge a knows X and B knows X and ay knows that B knows X and B knows that a knows X and ay knows the B knows that a knows X ad infinitum now common the importance of common knowledge is common knowledge in just about every field other than psychology for example logicians have long known that facts about the world can be inferred from states of knowledge of individuals as in a story that appeared in The New York Times about a year ago about a math problem from Singapore that went viral when is Cheryl's birthday if you if there are a number of facts that are known both by Albert and Bernard about Cheryl's birthday and then if Albert knows when Cheryl's birthday is but knows that Bernard does not know then Bernard knows when Cheryl's birthday did not know now knows now Albert knows what Cheryl's birthday is from that information you can deduce what Cheryl's birthday is one of many problems in which patterns of shared and common knowledge can lead to inferences about the state of the world common knowledge has long been appreciated in game theory going back to jean-jacques Rousseau's parable of the stag hunt imagine that Alfonse and Gaston are two hunters that live on opposite sides ends of the woods and cannot communicate every morning each one faces the choice between going out hunting for rabbit a small reward that they are virtually guaranteed to bag or to hunt together and try to fill a stag a large reward which neither of them can fell individually well it's not enough for Alphonse to know that stag are running that day for him to show up prepare to hunt stag because he has to also know that Gaston knows it but it's not even enough for him to know the Gaston knows the stagger running because he has also has to know the Gaston knows that he knows otherwise Gaston would not show up to hunt stag worried that Albert would Alphonse would show up to hunt rabbit ad infinitum only common knowledge makes it rational for the two of them to coordinate their behavior common knowledge has long been appreciated in political science in understanding protest movements why do dictators why are they terrified at the thought of a mass demonstration and why is freedom of assembly enshrined as a fundamental right in a democracy well if people are unhappy with their government every person individually might be disgruntled but no individual might would be maybe emboldened to stand up in protest out of the fear that the government will imprison in worship or shoot him down even if everyone is disgruntled as long as every one individual thinks that he might be the only one they would not have the assurance that they can protest and enjoy safety in numbers on the other hand if everyone shows up in a public square then everyone can see that everyone else can see that everyone else can see that they're dissatisfied with the government or if they share their discontent on Facebook or Twitter then a mass movement can materialize and emboldened with their common knowledge can send a dictator packing economists have long been familiar with the concept of common knowledge for example in the phenomenon of generating network externalities in 1984 when Apple introduced the new Macintosh computer it was not enough to persuade people that it was a superior computer to a PC because they had to worry that every individual even if he was or she was convinced that the Macintosh was a great computer might be afraid to invest in it out of fear that there might not be enough software and peripherals and so on people had to know that it that other people were buying it at the same time so Apple then invested in the most expensive commercial in the history of television directed by Ridley Scott and shown during the Superbowl an occasion in which everyone knew that everyone else was watching the Superbowl in order to generate the network externality of every sufficient people using the Macintosh for them to be confident that they would enjoy the mutual benefits but ah despite its importance in other fields cognitive a common knowledge has been a relatively neglected topic within the field you might expect it to have the most relevance to namely psychology and my friend and former colleague herb Clark is in the audience and herb is a notable exception for having pointed out the importance of common knowledge or common ground many decades ago but but he has been something of a voice in the wilderness I'm going to try to convince you today that common knowledge is a crucial but largely neglected concept in social psychology and it comes down to the basic question of why are we social in the first place what do we get out of hanging out with other people well evolutionary biologists point out that there are two fundamentally different kinds of social cooperation there's altruistic cooperation which has received the lion's share of attention in which one agent benefits someone else at a cost to himself raising the paradox of how altruistic cooperation could have evolved because it faces the inherent problem of protecting oneself against exploitation there is a by now familiar solution namely reciprocity or tit for tat and a great deal of research has suggested that we have evolved adaptations to the problem of policing reciprocity including a sense of fairness and moral emotions such as sympathy gratitude anger a guilt trust and so on however there is another form a of cooperation mutualistic cooperation in which you benefit another person and benefit yourself simultaneously and that has gotten less attention the inherent problem in mutualistic cooperation is not motivational but rather epistemic namely establishing coordination take for example two friends let's say herb and I both want to get together for coffee and we are indifferent as to whether we meet at Peet's or Starbucks and let's say my cell phone goes dead I might dimly recall that herb has a slight preference for Pete's and be tempted to show up there man I think well herb recalls that I have a slight preference for Starbucks so he might being the nice guy that he is show up at Starbucks well he might know that I recall that he prefers Pete so he might show up at Pete's then he might worry that I may not know that he recalls that I have a slight preference for Starbucks and so on the solution is common knowledge and the hypothesis that I'm going to explore is that because coordination problems have been so common in our in our individual lives and in our evolutionary history that we have psychological adaptations to common knowledge now crucially for people to have common knowledge they may not literally represent an infinite number of nested propositions if I know that he/she knows that I know that she knows and so on you quickly get a headache when you try to think through those implications common knowledge spoke as with other forms of infinitely nested propositions can be captured in a single recursive formula where Y is common knowledge if everyone knows X and everyone knows Y more plausibly common knowledge could consist of a simple mental state namely the intuition that something is public or out there and crucially common knowledge can be ascertained perceptually in a situation in which there is more than one perceiver they is a salient event everyone can see the event and everyone can see everyone else seeing the event that is sufficient to generate common knowledge I'm going to walk through three psychological phenomena that depend on common knowledge there's a fourth that I've worked on that I won't have time to discuss and that is bystander intervention unless we have time at the end I'd like to acknowledge my collaborators in these experiments James Lee University of Minnesota Kyle Thomas with the firm tip-tap Peter deshou Lee at SUNY Stony Brook and Omar Hawkeye at Brown Medical School I'll start with the implementation of Russo's parable of the stag hunt namely how people negotiate coordination dilemmas the question is are people sensitive to the need for common knowledge in deciding whether to engage in risky coordination so here's the scenario that we presented our subjects with you are a baker you can make dinner rules for a small profit or hot dog buns for a larger profit but only if the butcher is making hot dogs sausages that day and whether he does or not depends on the daily price so here's the payoff matrix remember your the baker will have the subjects with a butcher you can make either hot dog buns or dinner rolls the butcher can make either hot dogs the meat or chicken wings and the payoffs are that depending on the day you can make either $2 a large profit but if the price is low that day it may only be $0.50 if you make hot dog buns while the butcher makes chicken wings the buttons without the meat are useless so you make nothing if you make dinner rolls then you get a dollar profit regardless of what the butcher does and we varied the levels of embedding of knowledge in a private knowledge condition we tell people that a messenger has told you but not the butcher today's hotdog price in the first shared knowledge condition we call secondary knowledge a messenger has told the butcher the price and the messenger has also told you the price so you know that he knows but he doesn't know that you know in a tertiary shared knowledge condition we tell people that a messenger told the butcher the price and told the butcher that he would tell you the price but he did not tell the butcher that he would tell you that he had told him that is he knows that you know the price he doesn't know that you know that he knows and in a common knowledge condition the price is conveyed by a loudspeaker so you know that he knows that you know that he knows and so on what leads people to decide whether or not to take a chance at a large profit if the their counterpart does the same well in the private knowledge condition only 10% of people coordinated in secondary and tertiary knowledge somewhat less than half the people decided to coordinate significant difference from private knowledge with common knowledge almost 90% of the participants decided to coordinate a significant difference from private and secondary we also debrief people afterwards and probed whether they understood the differences among the conditions not or which condition they were in because it was between subjects not only so that we could eliminate subjects who did not understand the conditions but also so we could probe what condition people tended to confuse with what other condition that is using the technique of confusion matrices long used in perception and cognition to tap people's mental representations what we found is that virtually if these are the conditions that people actually were in this was the error that they reported off the diagonals virtually all of the errors consisted of confusing one kind of shared knowledge tertiary with another kind of shared knowledge secondary that is private shared and common knowledge were rarely confused with each other tertiary shared knowledge was often confused with secondary shared knowledge and it suggests that private shared and common knowledge are distinct cognitive gouri's a second set of phenomena that that I have explored it in fact the very phenomenon that got me interested in common knowledge is the phenomena at the intersection of psycho linguistics and social psychology that I think of as innuendo and euphemism that is while people just say what they mean why do we beat around the bush and shilly-shally and have people catch our drift or read between the lines instead of just blurting out what we mean let me give you an example this is a fictional example from the movie Fargo you may recall that in an opening scene a kidnapper has a hostage tied up in the backseat of his car inconveniently he's pulled over by the police because the car is missing its plates the policeman asks the kidnapper to show them his license he proffers his wallet with a license showing and a $50 bill extending ever-so-slightly and he says to the officer I was thinking that maybe the best thing would be to take care of it here in Brainerd a proposition that the audience and presumably the officer understand as a veiled bribe the New Yorker Illustrated a similar situation in which a driver winks at the officer and says what Hershey bar I don't see any Hershey bar now this is an example of what linguists sometimes called indirect speech and this is something that we do all the time for example if you could pass the guacamole that would be awesome now taken literally that doesn't make a whole lot of sense but we all interpret it as a polite request anyone who has sat through a fundraising dinner is familiar with euphemistic snoring such as we're counting on you to show leadership in our campaign for the future to wit give money would you like to come up and see my etchings this has been understood as a sexual come-on for so long that in 1934 James Thurber drew a cartoon in which any man says to his date you wait here and I'll bring the etchings down and then fans of The Sopranos might remember an episode in which member of the family goes up to someone in a bar and says I hear you're the jury foreman in the soprano trial it's an important civic responsibility you've got a wife and kids I know you'll do the right thing that is a veiled bribe threat veiled threat so here is the psychological puzzle why are bribes request seductions solicitations and threats so often veiled when presumably both parties know what they mean and martin novak james lee and i have proposed what we call the theory of the strategic speaker to preview that indirect speech is a rational strategy to attain plausible deniability of common knowledge of relational model relationship models let me step you through each of those but let me start with plausible deniability this begins with what game fear is something like Thomas Schelling called the identification problem namely how do you figure out the rational course of action when the outcome depends on another intelligent agent but you don't know the intelligent the agents values and bribing a police officer is a clear-cut case so imagine that you are a driver and you had two options to tender a bribe in so many words or to remain silent what is the optimal strategy well the answer is it depends it depends on whether you're facing a dishonest officer who would accept the bribe and set you free a high payoff on the other hand you might be facing an honest officer who would not only rebuff the bribe but might arrest you for bribery a very high cost on the other hand if you remain silent you would get the moderate cost of a traffic ticket in either case and in deciding whether to take the chance at a high payoff at a high penalty or a guaranteed moderate cost it's not clear what the optimal strategy is now let's imagine you had a third option a veiled bribe as and I was wondering if we could take care of it here in Brainerd well now a dishonest officer could sniff out the bribe and accept the payment giving you the high payoff of going free and honest officer couldn't make a bribery charge stick in court by the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt the worst thing that he'd give you is a traffic ticket so the veiled bribe combines the very high payoff of bribing a dishonest officer with a relatively small cost of failing to bribe an honest officer in a single option and that makes it the optimal choice this is the logic of plausible deniability and it's pretty straightforward now things start to get a bit more interesting namely why do people use indirect speech in non legal situations where there are no financial or legal payoffs or penalties for example it bribery in everyday life now you might say bribery in everyday life when would I an honest upstanding citizen ever be tempted to offer a bribe in everyday life well how's this you want to go to the hottest restaurant in town you have no reservation why not slip the maitre d a $20 bill in exchange for jumping the queue and being seated immediately this is the assignment that an editor at gourmet magazine gave the journalist Bruce Feiler who dared him to try it I in some of Manhattan's chicest restaurants on a Saturday night and write up his experiences for the magazine and I found this report utterly fascinating but one thing although as far as I know no one has ever gone to jail for the crime of attempting to bribe a maitre d the assignment filled him with anxiety and here's how he started the article I am nervous truly nervous as the taxi bounces through the trendier neighborhoods of Manhattan I keep imagining the possible retorts of some incensed maitre d what kind of establishment do you think this is how dare you insult me do you think you can get in with that second when he did screw up the courage to offer the bribe he instinctively used indirect speech he held a $20 bill out the line of sight of the himself in the maitre d and he used a line such as such as I hope you can fit us in or can you speed up my weight or I was wondering if you might have a cancellation and the third interesting finding was the outcome which is that it worked every time as he put it we were seated in between two and eight minutes to the astonishment of my date so what's going on what are the intangible costs that drive people to indirect speech and here's a theory that it is consistent relationship mismatches that is that human relationships fall into a small number of types each has a tacit rule for distributing resources each applies by default to certain kinds of dyads contexts and resources but crucially each can be extended to other kinds through negotiation this is a theory that I co-opted from the anthropologist Alan Fisk whose sister Susan received one of the awards yesterday at the awards ceremony according to Alan Fisk human relationship you mean relationships fall into just three types there is dominance whose rule is don't mess with me and which presumably evolved from the dominance hierarchies that are prevalent throughout the primate in order D the mammalian class there's a very different relationship of commonality whose rule is what's mine is line what's line is mine communal sharing and which naturally evolved by the mechanism of kin selection and in situations of mutualism and that's the natural relationship that we have with our kin with our spouse with our close friends and then there is reciprocity the rule you scratch my back I'll scratch yours which conforms to the logic of reciprocal altruism now behavior that's acceptable when one relationship is in effect can be anomalous in another Fiske points out for example you could at the cocktail party you could go over to your boyfriend or girlfriend and or husband or wife and help yourself to a shrimp off their plate but you wouldn't go up to the president of the Association for psychological science for example and help yourself to a shrimp off her plate because what you can get away with in a relationship of commonality you can't get away with in a relationship of dominance another example if you are invited over to a dinner party it would be rather gauche if at the end of the meal you pulled out your wallet and offered to pay the host for the cost of the food and again that's because in close friends follow the relationship of commonality in which the underlying assumption is that people give and take freely I in contrast if you were at a restaurant you would not go up to the owner and say well we really enjoyed ourselves this evening at some point we'll have you back because their reciprocity reigns now when those are cases where the relationship in force is clear-cut everyone knows what to do but when relationships are ambiguous and divergent understanding can lead to can be costly which we experience as the emotion of awkwardness for example there can be awkward moments in a workplace or in university where a student or an employee doesn't know whether we can refer to as a supervisor on a first-name basis or invite them out after work for a beer where you have the tension between dominance or friendship it's well known that good friends should not engage in a significant business transaction such as one of them selling his car to the other because as we know the very act of negotiating a price can as we say put a strain on the friendship that is the conflict between a commonality relationship which holds among close friends and the reciprocity relationship that holds among business partners the clash between dominance and sex defines the battleground of sexual harassment as when as supervisor solicit sex from a supervisor or employee or student and even the two different kinds of communal relationships of friendship or sexual relationship give rise to the tensions of dating this gives rise to a social identification problem a kind of Miss coordination problem where the social costs of awkwardness from a mismatched relationship type can duplicate the payoff matrix of a legal identification problem even if there are no tangible fines or punishments and bribing a Maitre D' is a perfect example where the mismatch is between the authority relationship that ordinarily pertains to a restaurant where the maitre d is the master of his fief he seeks people where he and when he wants versus the reciprocity relationship that is brought up by the bribe under which the maitre d would be obligated to see the customer in exchange for accepting the bride so once again if the only options are to bribe or not bribe and the outcome depends on what kind of maitre d you're facing a corrupt maitre G could accept the bribe you get the reward of a quick table and consummate a relationship of reciprocity both sides understand the relationship in the same way on the other hand if you have a scrupulous maitre d who would say what kind of establishment do you think this is how dare you insult me do you think you can get in with that that is insisting on dominance while you're offering reciprocity the resulting miss coordination gives rise to the unpleasant motion of awkwardness I am nervous truly nervous on the other hand if you don't bribe then you accept the dominance relationship between the maitre d and the customer and you have the moderate cost of a long wait in either case however if there is a third option of I was wondering if you might have a cancellation well then a corrupt maitre d can sniff out the bribe and consummate a reciprocity relationship show you to a quick table a scrupulous maitre d could simply decide to let it pass let it slide maintain the dominance relationship the worst thing that you would have is the long wait you get the high payoff of bribing a corrupt maitre d combined with the small cost of failing to bribe a scrupulous maitre d combined in the same option making the ambiguous or veiled bribe the tempting choice there's one remaining problem which is no one is fooled by this charade why do people resort to indirect speech even when an innuendo is so obvious that both parties know its intent so the deniability is really not all that plausible why should a transparent innuendo still feel less awkward than an overture that is on the record this is a situation that figured into one of the amusing scenes from the romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally romantic comedies are often about the tension between a friendship and a sexual or romantic relationship in an early scene in the film harry and Sally have just met Harry makes a comment that Sally interprets as sexual and she confronts him you're coming on to me and Harry says what do you want me to do about it I take it back okay I take it back she says you can't take it back said why not she said because it's already out there he says oh geez what are we supposed to do call the cops it's already out there so the psychological puzzle is what is the status of an overture that is out there or on the record that makes it so much worse than a veiled overture that is implicated indirectly the hypothesis is that indirect speech merely provides shared knowledge whereas direct speech provides common knowledge and that relationships a kind of coordination game are maintained or nullified by common knowledge of the relationship type which is to say if imagine that Harry says would you like to come up and see my etchings and Sally turns him down well Sally knows that she's turned down a sexual overture and Harry knows that sally has turned down a sexual overture but to Sally know that Harry knows she could still be thinking well maybe Harry thinks I'm naive and does Harry know the Sally knows that he knows Harry could beeping well maybe Sally thinks I'm dense so there's no common knowledge and they can maintain the fiction of a friendship but now imagine that how I said would you like to come up and have sex well now Harry knows that Sally knows that Harry knows that Sal they cannot maintain the fiction of a friendship and that I suggest is what's behind the intuition that with direct speech blurting something out you can't take it back it's out there so here's an empirical test that James Lee and I did we had people take part in read fictional scenarios where a speaker utters a proposition varying in level of directness the subject puts himself or herself in the speaker's shoes or the hero shoes and rates the likelihood of various interpretations that the character might make in that scenario so we had a bribe scenario where Kyle is pulled over for speeding he hands over his wallet with a license and a $50 bill protruding and he says one of the following four things I'm very sorry officer I've really learned my lesson from now on you can be sure that I'll be more careful they only the very slightest scintilla of a hint of a bribe a little bit more direct I'm very sorry officer I know that I was speeding and that I'll have to pay for my mistake third I'm very sorry officer but I'm actually in the middle of something right now sort of an emergency so maybe the best thing would be to take care of this here without going to court or doing any paperwork still more overt or a naked bribe I'm very sorry officer if I give you a 50 will you just let me go we had a seduction scenario Michael and Lisa are co-workers and good friends after dinner Michael drives Lisa home when passing his apartment he says one of four options either Wow I feel like we've been talking so much but it's only ten-thirty slightly more risque my friend just emailed me these pictures from our trip to Europe and I was that I was telling you about do you want to come over and have a look a little bit more suggestive you know I have a really terrific view from my balcony you can see the whole city the lights the ocean would you like to come over and have a look or the naked come on I find you really attractive and I enjoyed being with you tonight a lot I'm sorry to come over and have sex we also had a threat scenario I won't go through the details where there is various degrees of veiling of a threat where a professor threatens a student with the loss of a fellowship unless she agrees to work in his lab for the summer so the prediction is that in indirect speech may generate a confident interpretation in the hearer but the confidence Falls with each level of embedding about a belief of beliefs about beliefs whereas direct speech generates common knowledge the degree of confidence that is high at all levels of embedding well it's a challenge to test common knowledge because it's hard to even understand that various degrees of embedded beliefs about beliefs about beliefs so we try to walk our subjects through it one step at a time in probing not interpretation on the part of the hearer first order beliefs we had we told people put yourself in Lisa's position what is she thinking at this point and we had seven statements raised varying in degree of Lisa's confidence ranging from I'm absolutely certain that Michael was not asking me to have sex I'm virtually certain and so on all the way to I'm virtually certain that he was asking me and I'm absolutely certain that he was asking me and we assigned them numbers one to seven second-order speakers belief about what the hell adhere interpreted lisa has politely said that she wants to go home now put yourself in Michael's position what is he thinking and we gave them alternatives ranging from I'm absolutely certain that Lisa didn't understand that I was asking her for sex - I'm absolutely certain that she did understand second-order hero' belief how they here interprets the speaker's belief about the heroes interpretation Lisa knows that Michael was asking her to have sex put yourself in her position what is she thinking now Michael thinks that I didn't understand he's asking me to have sex I'm absolutely certain - - that statements veering up - Michael knows that I understood that he was asking me to have sex I'm absolutely certain of that so we use the first person we varied the choice of verb both of which make statements about embedded belief states easier to entertain third-order speaker suppose that michael does realize that lisa knowingly turn down his invitation to have sex put yourself in michael's position what is he thinking these the things that i didn't understand that she turned me down for sex i'm absolutely certain of that all the way down to lisa knows that i understood that she turned me down for sex i'm absolutely certain of that finally we pushed our luck and we probed the third-order hereis state of belief suppose that lisa is certain that Michael knows she turned down his invitation to have sex put yourself in Lisa's position what is she thinking Michael understands that I turned him down for sex but he doesn't realize that I know he understands that too and he does realize that I know he understands that so here are the results on the x-axis we have degree of embedding of belief from what the how the hero interprets it to how they speaker guesses the here interprets it speakers guess about the sorry here is guess about the speaker's guess about the hero's interpretation and so on the parameter is the degree of explicitness from very vague to overt you can see that for all the forms of speech that are suggestive or innuendos the degree of confidence Falls with the level of embedding of he thinks that she thinks that he thinks that she thinks with overt speech people are equally confident no matter how many levels of embedding you go so to sum up the this part of the talk the analysis of innuendo and euphemism innuendo merely provides shared knowledge direct speech provides common knowledge social relationships a kind of coordination game are ratified by common knowledge of the relationship type innuendos by preventing common knowledge allow a proposition to be tendered without if so facto changing the relationship type by the very act of offering the proposition the third phenomenon that I will talk about this morning is the phenomenon of self conscious emotions which I briefly alluded to in the discussion of indirect speech ah when we commit a social infraction a faux pas in front of onlookers why do we experience unpleasant self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment guilt and shame and I will they are separate but I'm for the purpose of this talk I'll treat them interchangeably why do we avert our gaze why do we not want to show our face why do we cringe why do we blush well here's a hypothesis it's self conscious emotions have the function of safeguarding relationships by preventing what we call a defection trap so social relationships are coordination games that is two people can benefit if they tacitly agree on mutual provision of kindness or respect or support or a difference or affection or malice as long as both parties agree that that's the relationship in force now a common knowledge of a breach of mutual expectation that is a faux pas can unravel the relationship as each one worries that the other one might interpret the faux pas as a defection and therefore preemptively defect in which case it would be rational for you to defect the other party worrying about that might preemptively preemptively defect and so on what we call a defection trap what self-conscious emotions do the the blushing the embarrassment and so on is they motivate the transgressor to acknowledge the violation to show that he has the same expectations that is he may have messed up he may have violated a rule but he knows what the rules are that is he might be a bumbler but he is not a psychopath or a loose cannon or an oddball signal that it won't be repeated in the form of credible apologies and that this should particularly be true when the violation is common knowledge we ran two experiments we had participants imagine being caught in an embarrassing situation they made fun of a mutual friends speech impediment where the friend shows up and catches them they pilfer petty cash to compensate for a lost repeat receipt they couldn't get reimbursed so they rectify the situation by stealing from petty cash or they pass gas in a lecture with various degrees of audible liddie and we vary the level of knowledge I in private knowledge no one noticed or someone noticed but you don't know that someone noticed which really should be the same as as that no one noticing at all as far as you're concerned we had two conditions of shared knowledge someone noticed you know that they noticed that they don't know that you know or one level higher someone noticed and they also know that you saw them notice finally common knowledge you make eye contact a very effective common knowledge generator and which is utterly incriminating we had people rate the degree to which they would imagine themselves feeling self-conscious emotions like guilt embarrassment shame also the degree to which they thought they might show it in bodily postures such as cringing or blushing I'll just show the rated emotion and with private knowledge there's a moderate degree of embarrassment with shared knowledge considerably more and with common knowledge the highest degree of rated embarrassment of all the physical reactions paralleled the reported degrees of experienced emotion now it is dodgy when you simply ask people to imagine themselves in a situation and to report what they think they might feel in that situation so we wanted to come up with a case in which we actually put them in a compromising situation we used a paradigm that is has become fairly common in research on self-conscious emotions that is we had them sing out loud which is a pretty reliable way to make someone feel embarrassed specifically we had them perform a karaoke song before a panel of judges who they thought were fellow students the Adele song rolling in the deep' which has a nice soaring chorus by which people could embarrass themselves in a shared knowledge condition the we told them that the judges think that it's a one-way video feed that is they don't know that you can actually see them they can see you they think you can't see them in the common knowledge condition we said they know that it's a two-way video feed so as they are watching you perform they know that you are seeing them judge you now these people weren't actually present it was just a videotape but the most of the subjects believed that these really were fellow students and not surprisingly we found that in mere shared knowledge there was a significant degree of embarrassment but there was far more when the witnessed act was common knowledge so some final thoughts on common knowledge if common knowledge is so fundamental to social life why haven't we noticed it before why hasn't it got there you've gotten the kind of attention that we've given to cheater detection and a sense of fairness and emotions like trust and anger and so on and I suggest that we actually have we don't use the language of common knowledge to describe it but it actually is quite ubiquitous in social life such as in the dynamics of hypocrisy of taboo of tact of political correctness so-called red lines market bubbles where you have false common knowledge where everyone thinks that everyone else thinks that an asset is increasing and so it does increase up to a point in mock outrage as in I'm shocked shocked to find that gambling is taking place in this establishment in the phenomenon of Kardashians celebrity where someone is famous for being famous and in the Washington gaffe defined as when a politician says something that is true I also think that we have and we refer to common knowledge using a lay coffee and conceptual metaphor that is a family of related linguistic tropes that are all organized around a central image in particular the common knowledge is a conspicuous object or sound as in it's out there the cat is out of the bag it was in your face the bell can't be unrung of course the Emperor's New Clothes the elephant in the room something that everyone can not help but notice but they pretend not to notice and one more that should be familiar to those of you who are fans of the Seinfeld sitcom which I will show you now thinking of making a big move in this course last night distinct chicken back well that's a big move Georgie boy are you confident in me I love you return fifty-fifty because if you don't get that return it's a pretty big matzo ball yes that's a pretty big matzo ball hanging out there so in sum I'd like to suggest that while people may have difficulty literally entertaining the state of knowledge of I know that she knows that I know that she knows that I know that she knows and so on everyone has a perfectly intuitive understanding of the emperor the elephant and the bucks of all thank you very much you

Channel: PsychologicalScience

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Length: 43min 38sec (2618 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 06 2016