Steven Pinker on Speculation Bubbles, Super Bowl Ads, and What Leaders Need to Know About Group Psychology

I'm Audie Ignatius. I'm Alison Beard and this is the HVR Ideacast. All right, so Alison, the more I think about leadership, the more I think that leading effectively is almost all about psychology. Yeah, I can see what you mean. You know, you need to understand consumers' wants and needs, your employees' wants and needs, your business partners' wants and needs, really anticipating everything that stakeholders might do or think.

Yeah, exactly. I think successful leaders need to think on multiple levels, both to cope with the complexity of their jobs and to outthink their competition. So our guest today, Stephen Pinker, is all about the power of knowledge, understanding what we know, what we don't know, and most importantly, whether or not others know what we know. So I know that sounds very Donald Rumsfeldian, but there is power in understanding all of this.

Yeah, it does sound very meta, but Pinker is an expert in explaining very complex topics. in a way that feels understandable and applicable to our everyday lives. So I'm interested to hear what he has to say. Absolutely. So Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard University, author of the new book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.

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