About

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist interested in all aspects of language, mind, and human nature. He 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.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Environmental ethics
• Social psychology
• Ecology
• Computer Science
• Law
• Epistemology
• Economics
• Neoclassical economics
• Public relations
• Biology
• Neuroscience
• Medicine
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• La sélection naturelle des connards

  Sciences Humaines · 2025-08-22

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Judith Rich Harris and child development: 25 years after The Nurture Assumption

  Developmental Review · 2024-10-18

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2023 · 96 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Science is among humanity's greatest achievements, yet scientific censorship is rarely studied empirically. We explore the social, psychological, and institutional causes and consequences of scientific censorship (defined as actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific quality). Popular narratives suggest that scientific censorship is driven by authoritarian officials with dark motives, such as dogmatism and intolerance. Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups. This perspective helps explain both recent findings on scientific censorship and recent changes to scientific institutions, such as the use of harm-based criteria to evaluate research. We discuss unknowns surrounding the consequences of censorship and provide recommendations for improving transparency and accountability in scientific decision-making to enable the exploration of these unknowns. The benefits of censorship may sometimes outweigh costs. However, until costs and benefits are examined empirically, scholars on opposing sides of ongoing debates are left to quarrel based on competing values, assumptions, and intuitions.

  PublisherDOI

• Joint statement in support of hepatitis C human challenge studies

  ˜The œLancet. Gastroenterology & hepatology · 2023-09-21 · 4 citations

  letterOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Intelligence and Rationality of AI and Humans: A Conversation With Steven Pinker

  Harvard Data Science Review · 2023-10-27 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Harvard Data Science Review’s Founding Editor-in-Chief, Xiao-Li Meng, and Media Feature Editor, Liberty Vittert, interviewed Dr. Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and expert on the human mind, about how artificial intelligence is viewed within his fields of study. Dr. Pinker has researched and published several articles and books on language, cognition, and social relations.In this conversation, these two data scientists and an experimental cognitive psychologist theorize about the future societal roles of AI platforms like ChatGPT and discuss whether technology has the ability to be rational and intelligent, as well as how those terms might vary in definition between different fields and between the human brain and AI.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reply to Joachim Krueger's Review of <i>Rationality</i>

  The American Journal of Psychology · 2022-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  I enjoyed Joachim Krueger's thoughtful and good-natured review of Rationality. As fellow students of rationality and irrationality, including self-serving biases, neither of us will be surprised that I wish to defend myself in the face of some of his gentle critical remarks.Krueger suggests that I anchored my story in the mainstream heuristics-and-biases school of reasoning. But members of that school beg to differ: Some have given me a hard time for being too nice to their adversaries such as Gerd Gigerenzer, Ralph Hertwig, Daniel Kahan, and Leda Cosmides. While acknowledging the monumental contributions of Tversky, Kahneman, Slovic, and others, my own portrait of the human mind is more charitable to our species than the bag-of-biases and reflexive-caveman images that are often associated with that school. Starting from the first chapter, in which I tout the rationality of the San hunter–gatherers of the Kalahari (including their Bayesian reasoning), I present many defenses of human reasoning in ecologically natural circumstances, together with suggestions on how people's intuitions can be enhanced to grasp normative principles, a prospect about which the heuristics-and-biases theorists tend to be pessimistic.Overall, I agree with Krueger's approach to rationality more than his review suggests. I agree that trust, together with other social emotions such as sympathy, evolved as adaptations to solve prisoner's dilemmas, and I wrote as much on p. 242 (and in greater depth in How the Mind Works and The Better Angels of Our Nature). The problem, of course, is that the solutions don't scale well beyond close-knit social networks. In larger societies, and on the international scale, cheaters can exploit others’ trust, and the temptations for defection can be enormous. Here the famous Russian watchword applies: Trust but verify.I agree, too, that ignorance can be rational (see the section “Rational Ignorance,” pp. 56–58), that loss aversion is an adaptation to the singularity of death, and that individual rationality can subvert collective welfare. I disagree, though, with the suggestion that “methodological individualism” is a “sacred tenet of the Enlightenment.” Enlightenment thinkers were obsessed with the tension between self-interested rationality and collective welfare, as we see in analyses of the social contract by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Smith, and the framers of the American Constitution. For apposite quotes, see the epigraph to the chapter on game theory from Hume and, bracketing the chapter, the quote in the penultimate sentence from Hobbes.I also appreciated Krueger's own epigraph, from one of my favorite Dylan songs, “Things have changed.”

  PublisherDOI

• Enlightenment Environmentalism: A Humanistic Response to Climate Change

  Journal of Applied Corporate Finance · 2021 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Environmental ethics

  The author counters the prevailing pessimism about the environment, which he calls “Romantic Declinism,” with his own “Enlightenment humanism,” which is informed by science and belief in the possibility of progress. While sharing environmentalists’ goal of protecting the air and water, species, and ecosystems, the author begins with the conviction that environmental problems can be solved, given the right knowledge and proper use of it. Economic growth, while no doubt contributing to the problem, is also a major and essential part of the solution. Where Romantic Declinists see modern humans as “vile despoilers of a pristine planet,” the author views human ingenuity and technology as the path not to ecological suicide, but to a more prosperous, and eventually greener, global society. Enlightened environmentalism recognizes the human need to produce energy to lift itself out of poverty, and seeks the means to do so while minimizing the damage to the planet and the living world. As recounted by the author, the 200‐year trend of energy decarbonization provides clear evidence that, as the world gets richer and more technologically advanced, it “dematerializes, decarbonizes, and densifies,” thereby sparing land and species. And new technology, notably nuclear power, holds out the promise of generating electricity with little or no carbon emitted, while carbon capture holds out the possibility of removing CO 2 from the atmosphere. As the author sums up this approach, Problems are solvable. That does not mean that they will solve themselves, but it does mean that we can solve them if we sustain the benevolent forces of modernity that have allowed us to solve problems so far, including societal prosperity, wisely regulated markets, international governance, and investments in science and technology .

  PublisherDOI

• « La rationalité nous rend plus libres »

  Cerveau & Psycho · 2021-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Inequality and Progress

  Journal of applied corporate finance · 2021-09-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The author begins by noting that, however much economic inequality has become an obsession in developed countries in the 21st century, it is “not a fundamental component of well‐being… like health, prosperity, knowledge, safety, or peace.” Citing philosopher Harry Frankfurt, he argues that “inequality itself is not morally objectionable; what is objectionable is poverty … it is not important everyone should have the same . What is morally important is that each should have enough .” The widespread confusion of inequality with poverty is viewed as deriving from the “lump” or “zero‐sum” fallacy,” which effectively assumes the impossibility of gains from trade or creating social wealth. The corollary to this belief is that if and when some people get richer, others must have been the losers or somehow impoverished by that process of creating wealth. Another source of confusion is the conflation of inequality with unfairness . Contrary to the popular view, research has shown that people actually tend to prefer unequal distributions among citizens in their country, provided they sense that the allocation process is based on merit—that bonuses tend to go to harder workers, more generous helpers, or even the lucky winners of an impartial lottery. What's more, inequality is almost the inevitable accompaniment of social progress. When a society starts to generate substantial wealth, an increase in absolute inequality is almost a mathematical necessity. Nevertheless, as countries grow richer, they spend more on help for the poor. Citing the Gini calculations by economist Branko Milanović, the author demonstrates that inequality between countries has been falling even as inequality within countries has risen since about 1980, and that the “winners” since 1980 have included most of humanity. And in explaining how people seemingly reconcile obvious improvements in living standards in recent decades with the conventional wisdom of economic stagnation, the author identifies four other serious misconceptions perpetuated by conventional inequality statistics: Failure to distinguish between absolute and relative poverty; Failure to recognize social mobility; Failure to reflect increased social spending and wealth transfers; and Failure to reflect increases in the quality of goods consumed. The good news is that the long‐term trend in history since the Enlightenment has been for the fortunes of all to rise. And while generating massive amounts of wealth, modern societies have been devoting an increasing proportion of that wealth to benefiting those less well‐off.

  PublisherDOI

• Piled Modifiers, Buried Verbs, and Other Turgid Prose in the <i>American Political Science Review</i>

  PS Political Science & Politics · 2021-08-18 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  ABSTRACT Academic writing is notoriously difficult to read. Can political science do better? To assess the state of prose in political science, we examined a recent issue of the American Political Science Review. We evaluated the articles according to the basic principles of style endorsed by writing experts. We find that the writing suffers most from heavy noun phrases in forms such as noun noun noun and adjective adjective noun noun. Further, we describe five contributors that swell noun phrases: piled modifiers, needless words, nebulous nouns, missing prepositions, and buried verbs. We document more than a thousand examples and demonstrate how to revise each one with principles of style. We also draw on research in cognitive science to explain why these constructions confuse, mislead, and distract readers.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01HD018381

  NIH · $4.0M · 2008

• NIH Grant T32MH018823

  NIH · $1.4M · 2003

Frequent coauthors

• Paula Griffiths

  Loughborough University

  121 shared

• Peter Lloyd

  121 shared

• John Gilbert

  University of British Columbia

  121 shared

• Robert B. Stevenson

  121 shared

• Edith L. Bavin

  La Trobe University

  121 shared

• Elaine Clark

  121 shared

• Paul Fletcher

  Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

  121 shared

• San Diego

  Walter de Gruyter (Germany)

  121 shared

Education

• B.A., Psychology

  Stanford University

  1975

• Ph.D., Psychology

  MIT

  1981

Awards & honors

• BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award
• Richard Hanania Prize for Excellence in Science Writing