Steven Pinker
Professor of Psychology
Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
Steven Pinker see our greatest challenges as overcoming the obstacles to secular enlightenment in many parts of the world.
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Synthesizing ideas really depends on having a universe of ideas to recombine in the first place, says Steven Pinker.
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8 min
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Language sheds light on the idea that the mind is a computational system.
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13 min
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Not all problems have to have a moralistic solution.
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6 min
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There’s no such thing as free will in the sense of a ghost in the machine; our behavior is the product of physical processes in the brain rather than some […]
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2 min
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Steven Pinker starts by asserting that using the word God or faith for that which you don’t know is a cop out. He goes on to describe what he sees […]
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7 min
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Steven Pinker talks about his personal philosophy and what reason means to him.
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7 min
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There’s so much of science and scholarship that consists of hyper specialized efforts, Steven Pinker says.
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13 min
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The Harvard psychologist on negotiating: the hothead wins.
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4 min
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The best-selling author of The Blank Slate argues human behavior is shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations, not parental upbringing.
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6 min
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