Do You Know What I Know?

"Walking through the Long Island Railroad concourse, my son was perplexed by the close proximity of three chicken-themed restaurants-Chick-fil-A, Raising Cane's, and Pollo Campero-and by the fact that a shop called Gotham News mainly seemed to sell candy and bottled water. He also wanted to know why some people, as they strolled or waited, drank out of cans in brown paper bags. "Why do they use those bags?" he asked."

"As we all know, the idea is that the bags obscure the beverage being consumed, allowing drinkers and police officers to ignore prohibitions on drinking alcohol in public places. Of course, the bags don't actually hide anything; in fact, they are reserved specifically for, and definitively signal, the drinking of alcohol. (It would never occur to you to sip a bottle of Fiji water that was in a paper bag.)"

Brown-bagging functions as a social pretense in which paper bags are used to obscure beverages while actually signaling alcohol consumption; drinkers, police, and bystanders engage in a tacit mutual awareness that preserves public decorum while allowing private rule-breaking. The practice exemplifies common-knowledge dynamics, where what individuals know about what others know shapes behavior. Recursive knowledge — knowing that others know that one is drinking — enables coordinated inaction and selective enforcement. Game-theoretic and psychological analyses treat such phenomena as central to understanding coordination problems, signaling, legal fictions, social norms, and institutions related to money, power, and everyday interaction.

Read at The New Yorker