Common knowledge, coordination, and strategic mentalizing in human social life
De Freitas first author. A review of the group's own experiments rather than new data, arguing that people are highly sensitive to the difference between common knowledge and merely private or shared knowledge, and deploy that distinction strategically in market cooperation, innuendo, bystander intervention and moral condemnation. The authors propose that people represent common knowledge simply as a sense that something is public. It is a Contributed submission with named reviewers.
De Freitas first author. A review of the group's own experiments rather than new data, arguing that people are highly sensitive to the difference between common knowledge and merely private or shared knowledge, and deploy that distinction strategically in market cooperation, innuendo, bystander intervention and moral condemnation. The authors propose that people represent common knowledge simply as a sense that something is public. It is a Contributed submission with named reviewers.
Written from the full text read 2026-10-18.
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De Freitas, J., Thomas, K., DeScioli, P., & Pinker, S. (2019). Common knowledge, coordination, and strategic mentalizing in human social life. PNAS, 116(28), 13751-13758. doi:10.1073/pnas.1905518116.