Experimental psychologist interested in all aspects of language, mind, and human nature.
Steven Pinker conducts research on a variety of topics in psychology and cognitive science, including common knowledge (things that everyone knows everyone knows), language acquisition, emotion, the moral sense, rationality, and trends in violence.
Latest News and Updates
- Trump Says the Country Is ‘Dying.’ The Data Say Otherwise.
- How I wish Harvard taught students to talk about Israel
- Boston Globe: Harvard should shut down campus occupations
- 2 1/2 D: The Stereoscopic Photography of Steven Pinker. Review in Whitehot Magazine, April 2024
- Call Magazine, OOOM 100: The World’s Most Inspiring People 2024
- Intelligencer, Why October 7 May Mark a Turning Point for Universities
- Boston Globe: A five-point plan to save Harvard from itself
- Quillette, "There's Nothing Mystical About the Idea that Ideas Change History"
- PNAS: Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda
- Nautilus: Psychology Lost a Great Mind
- Boston Globe: New faculty-led organization at Harvard will defend academic freedom
- Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning: Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate 20+ years later
- BBVA Foundation: The Frontiers of Knowledge Award goes to Steven Pinker and Peter Singer for innovative academic contributions in the domains of rationality and moral progress that have achieved a widespread impact in the public sphere
- Port Magazine: Steven Pinker: Things I like / Things I Dislike
- The Harvard Gazette: Will ChatGPT supplant us as writers, thinkers?
- IAI News: Pinker on the power of irrationality - Why it can be rational to be irrational
- Persuasion: Reason To Believe - How and why irrationality takes hold, and what do to about it.
- Skeptical Inquirer Magazine: Reason’s Valiant Champion
- Financial Times: Steven Pinker: ‘Putin’s invasion won’t lead to a return to the age of warring civilisation’
- Now in Paperback - Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
- Symposium: Enlightenment 2.0 - A Review of “Rationality,” by Steven Pinker
- Collate: Steven Pinker and Scott Aaronson Debate AI Scaling!
- Skeptic: ESP Debate - Is Belief in ESP Irrational?
- A Night @ the Opera with Steven Pinker: Is Music a Universal Language?
- The Blog of Scott Aaronson: Steven Pinker and I debate AI scaling!
- Bicycling: This Scientist Can't Stop Thinking About Cycling
- Boston Globe: Is Russia’s war with Ukraine the end of the Long Peace?
- Why IBB Translated Steven Pinker’s New Book RATIONALITY for the Middle East - Ideas Beyond Borders
- BBC News: Three ways to be more rational this year
- BBC Radio: Think with Pinker
- Quillette: The Need for Rationality in a Hostile World
- Steven Pinker : "L'irrationalité actuelle ne signifie pas que notre espèce débloque"
- The Weekly Dish: Steven Pinker on Rationality In Our Tribal Times
- The Next Big Idea Podcast: Steven Pinker's Love Song to Critical Thinking
- Behavioral Scientist: The Monty Hall Problem (Finally) Explained
- The Washington Post: The power of rational thinking in a world that seems unreasonable
- Penguin: Where to start with Steven Pinker
- Richard Hanania: Rationality Requires Incentives: An Interview with Steven Pinker
- Steven Pinker: 'A generation has to watch every word... It could cripple intellectual life'
- The Times: Rationality - Steven Pinker's war on conspiracy theories
- New York Times Magazine: Steven Pinker Thinks Your Sense of Imminent Doom Is Wrong
- Martin Rees and Steven Pinker: Wagering on catastrophe
- Effective Altruism: An Interview with Steven Pinker
- How humans gained an "extra life" (Review Steven Johnson’s “Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer.”)
- Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
- Intro to Psych Science: Lecture 6, The Brain
- "What is human nature?" Panpsychast podcast (June 7, 2020)
- "Can we build a more rational world?" The Good Fight podcast
- The pandemic exposes human nature: 10 evolutionary insights
- Freakonomics podcast - People I (Mostly) Admire Ep. 1: Steven Pinker
- Responses to the Letter to the Linguistics Society of America
- Twenty Questions with Steven Pinker
- From Verbs to War: In Conversation With Steven Pinker
- Lectures on Rationality
- Maimonides’ Ladder: States of Mutual Knowledge and the Perception of Charitability
- A critical period for second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers
- Get Shorty: Steven Pinker on the Enlightenment
- Universality and diversity in human song
- "Dissecting Morality" podcast from the Ministry of Ideas
Featured Books
Twitter Feed
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The Best Sentences of 2024 - The New York Times. Note how most either use metaphors and similes, or play with the literal meanings of idioms and cliches. In The Sense of Style I noted that good writing engages the reader's visual imagery, rather than being just a train of… t.co/c23iikxehf
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1,066 Good News Stories You Didn't Click On in 2024 - Human Progress t.co/lyzzcyJSd7
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On the recovery of several threatened species: t.co/hkjfIffXBi
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We Could Have Had Ozempic Nearly 40 Years Ago: NYT story based on the experience of my Harvard colleague (and Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard Co-President) Jeffrey Flier @jflier t.co/IcxlRHji6f
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Local anecdote: Boston mythology holds that Boston neighborhoods have distinct Boston accents, e.g., Southie, Charlestown, Dorchester. Unlikely: people move among them, taking their accents with them; pahking y' cah tracks class and cohort, not neighborhood.
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William Labov, Who Studied How Society Shapes Language, Dies at 97. Among other things, Bill was among the 1st to show that Black English follows systematic grammatical rules (still a staple of my intro courses) and that accents & dialects go with social classes, not just… t.co/n6DoBBb62z