Conscious experience is usually portrayed as so inherently private that its actual role in our cognitive lives becomes deeply puzzling. This talk discusses a solution to this puzzle, suggested by social cognitive neuroscience: that the role of conscious experience is in fact social. Introspected conscious perception is for joint decision-making, and our experience of agency and choice is for common knowledge and social cohesion. Part of the proposal is that conscious experience can play this public role, not in spite of the privacy, but in virtue of the privacy. Finally, the proposal links privacy of mind to the representation of willed action, and this helps explain away our belief in indeterminism.