Common Knowledge of Feelings

Hi everyone,

Everything got a bit on top of me this week and I couldn’t muster a longer post, so here’s something interesting I noticed recently.

One area I go significantly off my gender script is that I’m a bit too into talking about feelings - asking people how they feel, telling people how I feel, having long conversations about this. I do this in most of my major relationships, whether romantic ones or friendships (to some degree even professional ones, but that’s more complicated), and it forms a fairly critical part of building those relationships for me.

Recently I had a conversation that went something like:

Me: (detailed explanation of some feelings)

Them: Yes, I know this.

Me: Yes, but now I know you know this.

And it occurred to me afterwards that this was an interesting example of common knowledge.

Common knowledge in the sense that I use it (I’m not quite sure where I got that sense from - usage varies wildly) means something slightly more specific than just something that everyone knows. It’s something that everyone in a group knows, and knows that everyone knows, and knows that everyone knows that everyone knows, etc. It is more than mere shared knowledge which is something that everyone knows.

For example, suppose I know that I’m angry about something and I write it down in my diary. You sneakily read my diary, but I don’t know you did that. Now we both know that I am angry, but I don’t know that you know so it’s not common knowledge. Now suppose that I saw you reading my diary (but you didn’t see me). Now I know you know I’m angry (although you don’t know I’m also angry about you reading my diary!), but you don’t know that, so it’s still not common knowledge. etc.

Another example: If I have something to share, and I tell each of two friends individually, then this is now knowledge that everyone has that is not common knowledge, because they do not (yet) know that they know.

How do you create common knowledge? That’s easy - you talk (or write) about it explicitly, in some form or another, with the group of people you want it to be common knowledge among. Almost nothing else works. Once you have done this, everyone in the group is aware that the information was shared, and who it was shared with, and this is what creates common knowledge.

The nice thing about common knowledge is that it creates a reliable platform for future behaviour - you can count reliably on people knowing things, and people know that you will expect them to know that and so can modify their behaviour accordingly.

It’s also harder to be wrong about what’s common knowledge than it is to be wrong about what other people know. I have definitely had conversations with close friends and partners where I was very surprised to discover they didn’t know something about me (this is almost never their fault, and is usually mine for assuming they knew something that was obvious to me).

Another benefit of common knowledge, and one I personally care about a lot, is that often it resolves fears. Without common knowledge it’s really easy to be terrified of everyone finding out something that they in fact already know.

All these and more combine well to make common knowledge a foundation of building a relationship, because they help make sure everyone is on the same page about what they are feeling and what’s going on and, in a trusted relationship, that will usually go better for everyone (see Trust Beyond Reason). Common knowledge is knowledge that you can treat as intrinsically part of the relationship, in a way that merely shared knowledge is not.

This is particularly true of feelings, because feelings are often shared knowledge without being common knowledge. In a healthy relationship of course nobody is reading anyone’s diaries, but usually we have a better idea of what’s going on with those we care about than they explicitly tell us, because we know them quite well and can generally figure out what’s going.

A lot of why close relationships are both great and terrifying is this experience of being truly known by another - being seen as you are, regardless of whether you want to be able to hide it - and it seems to me that if you’re going to experience that you might as well take the extra step needed to make that knowledge common among you.