Steven Pinker

Psychologist, writer, and educator

• Born: September 18, 1954
• Place of Birth: Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Education: McGill University; Harvard University

Significance: Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his nonfiction writing.

Background

Steven Arthur Pinker was born September 18, 1954 in Montreal, Canada. He was raised in a mostly Jewish neighborhood. His parents were Harry and Roslyn Pinker. Harry was a lawyer and Roslyn was a counselor and school vice principal. Pinker’s sister, Susan, was born in 1957, and became a psychologist and writer. Pinker also has a younger brother, Robert, who works as a policy analyst for the Canadian government.

In a 2015 interview with Smashing Interviews Magazine, Pinker said, "I think growing up in a Jewish community where there’s a long tradition of argumentation and debate, sharpened my critical faculties and whetted my appetite for intellectual exploration."

Pinker attended McGill University and was awarded a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1976. He moved to the United States in 1976, and in 1979, he received a doctorate in experimental psychology from Harvard University.

Pinker became a naturalized citizen in 1980 and took a job as an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard. In 1981, he moved to Stanford University, again as an assistant professor of psychology. In 1982, he took a position as an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was associate professor and co-director of the Center of Cognitive Science at MIT from 1985 to 1994, becoming a full professor in 1989.

Pinker was director of the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience from 1994 to 1999. In 2003, he returned to Harvard as a full professor. In 2018, Pinker published his work Enlightenment Now, in which he advocatged for the defense of Enlightenment rationality from all modern political philosophies. Pinker then argued against allegations from fellow academics that Enlightenment philosophy was partially to blame for imperialism, slavery, genocide, and many other evils. In 2022, Pinker was awarded the BBVA Foundatrion Frontiers of Knowledge Award.

Life’s Work

Pinker’s early research was in the field of visual cognition, which covered such topics as imagery and shape recognition. He soon moved to the field of language acquisition, where he studied how children acquire language. His research led him to agree with linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory that language was a natural ability. Pinker formulated his own theory that natural language ability was a result of humans adapting as the species evolved. Pinker wrote Language Learnability and Language Developmentto share with other scholars the results of his language experiments. The book came out in 1984. It was followed in 1989 by Learnability and Cognition.

In 1994, Pinker shared his theories in a book written in an easy-to-understand, popular style. This book, The Language Instinct, became a bestseller and won many awards, including being listed as one of the New York Times Editor’s Choice Ten Best Books of 1994. The sequel came out in 1997 and was titled How the Mind Works. It was also a bestseller, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

Pinker continued to write about language in a way that was easy for the general public to understand. In 1999, his book In Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, he analyzed how language works by presenting his research, focusing on regular and irregular verbs, from the viewpoints of biology, psychology, child development, and other fields.

In 2003, his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, became the second of his works to be chosen as a Pulitzer Prize finalist. It also won other awards and explored the nature versus nurture debate. This was followed in 1997 by The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, which explored how language reflects humanity’s view of reality. He moved away from language with his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. In it he argues that humanity is becoming more peaceful, basing his ideas on both psychological and historical data. In 2014, his book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century was published. In it, he offers techniques to counter writing styles that are difficult to understand because they adhere to grammatical rules.

Pinker has been included on lists such as Time magazine’s "100 Most Influential People in the World Today," Foreign Policy’s "The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers," and he ranked number three on Prospect magazine’s "World Thinkers 2013."

Pinker won many awards, including the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the George A. Miller Prize in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the Henry Dale Prize from Great Britain’s Royal Institution. He was Humanist of the Year in 2006, and has been awarded eight honorary doctorates.

Impact

Pinker was a leading thinker in the fields of language, human nature, and the mind. His theory that language is hardwired into the brain as a result of the evolutionary process brought him to the forefront as a challenger of accepted intellectual thought. He clearly conveyed his controversial and complex theories in bestselling books that reached a general audience, as well as scholars.

Personal Life

Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980. They divorced in 1992 and he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995. After they divorced in 2006, he married novelist and philosopher, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in 2007.

Bibliography

Brockman, John. This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works. New York: Harper, 2013. Print.

Collin, Catherine. The Psychology Book. New York: DK, 2012. Print.

Fahy, Declan. The New Celebrity Scientists: Out of the Lab and into the Limelight. New York: Rowman, 2015. Print.

Henderson, Andrea Kovacs. American Men & Women of Science: A Biographical Directory of Today’s Leaders in Physical, Biological, and Related Sciences. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Print.

Parker, Melissa. "Steven Pinker Interview: Inside the Mind of One of the World’s Most Influential Thinkers." Smashing Interviews Magazine. Smashing Interviews Magazine, 20 Oct. 2015. Web. 21 Jan. 2016. <http://smashinginterviews.com/interviews/authors/steven-pinker-interview-inside-the-mind-of-one-of-the-worlds-most-influential-thinkers>.

"Steven Pinker." Department of Psychology. The President and Fellows of Harvard University, 2016. Web. 20 Jan. 2016. <http://stevenpinker.com>.

"Steven Pinker and Peter Singer Win Frontiers of Knowledge Award for Insights into Human Progress and the Moral Consideration of Animals." BBCA, 2022, www.bbva.com/en/steven-pinker-and-peter-singer-win-frontiers-of-knowledge-award-for-insights-into-human-progress-and-the-moral-consideration-of-animals/. Accessed 29 Sept. 2024.