RATIONAL RITUAL: CULTURE, COORDINATION, ANDCOMMON KNOWLEDGE

one genuinely possesses only what one has the ability to defend,”

the fundamental phenomenon of power is not the instrumentalization of another’s will, but the formation of a common will in a communication directed to reaching agreement”

A male hotel butler who in-trudes upon a naked female guest, instead of acting embarrassed and thereby letting the guest know that he knows, might say loudly, “Pardon me, sir.” Dissimulation can prevent common knowledge (Kuran 1995), but, as the examples here illustrate, honesty alone is not sufficient.

Since then, one government tactic has been to make the loaves smaller gradually; another has been to replace quietly a fraction of the wheat flour with cheaper corn flour (Jehl 1996). These tactics are more than just a matter of individual deception: each person could notice that their own loaf was smaller or tasted different but be unsure about how many other people also noticed. Changing the size or taste of the loaves is not the same public event as raising its price.

Rebelling against a regime is a coordination problem: each person is more willing to show up at a demonstration if many others do, perhaps because success is more likely and getting arrested is less likely.

“coordination problems”: each person wants to act only if others do also. Another term is “assurance game,” because no person wants to act alone (Sen 1967)

One aspect of a network is to what extent its friendship links are “weak” or “strong.” In a weak-link network, the friends of a given person’s friends tend not to be that person’s friends, whereas in a strong-link network, friends of friends tend to be friends.

terms of common knowledge generation, when a person hears something repeated, not only does she get the message, she knows it is repeated and hence knows that it is more likely that others have heard it.

Public rituals, rallies, and ceremonies generate the necessary common knowledge. A public ritual is not just about the transmission of meaning from a central source to each member of an audience; it is also about letting audience members know what other audience members know.

Because each individual wants to participate only if others do, each person must also know that others received a message. For that matter, because each person knows that other people need to be confident that others will participate, each person must know that other people know that other people have received a message, and so forth. In other words, knowledge of the message is not enough; what is also required is knowledge of others’ knowledge, knowledge of others’ knowledge of others’ knowledge, and so on—that is,

“common knowledge.”