Rational Ritual
Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge
About the book
Michael Suk-Young Chwe, a UCLA professor, explains public rituals through one idea from game theory: common knowledge. People coordinate only when each knows what the others know, knows that they know it, and so on. Chwe applies this to weddings, inaugurations, political rallies and ceremonies across history, arguing that rituals matter because they let each member of an audience know what everyone else is seeing. The same logic, he argues, explains why sellers of beer, internet and financial services pay for Super Bowl advertising, why anthems rely on repetition and why French Revolution festivals favored circular forms. The 2001 book links rational choice to culture and was reviewed in The New York Times and several economics journals.
Mark Zuckerberg said its idea of common knowledge, what people know that others know, is important for designing social media, which has to balance personalized and universal experiences.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Mark Zuckerberg (CEO/Facebook)
The book is about the concept of "common knowledge" and how people process the world not only based on what we personally know, but what we know other people know and our shared knowledge as well.
This is an important idea for designing social media, as we often face tradeoffs between creating personalized experiences for each individual and crafting universal experiences for everyone. I'm looking forward to exploring this further.
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