Steven Pinker
Professor of Psychology, Harvard University
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.
Why is Language Veiled?
Language sheds light on the idea that the mind is a computational system.
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13 min
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Finding a Non-Moralistic Solution
Not all problems have to have a moralistic solution.
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6 min
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Steven Pinker on Free Will
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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How do you make sense of the unknown?
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 On Reason
Steven Pinker talks about his personal philosophy and what reason means to him.
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7 min
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Steven Pinker on Writing About Science
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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Steven Pinker on Conflict Resolution
The Harvard psychologist on negotiating: the hothead wins.
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4 min
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Parenting Peaks at Conception
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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