Steven Pinker
Cognitive psychologist and author
Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist and Harvard professor who studies language and the mind and writes popular science books for general readers.
7 summaries 3h 04 min of listening
Born 1954 in Montreal, Canada
Influenced by Noam Chomsky, Peter Singer, Thomas Sowell, Thomas Nagel, Richard Dawkins
About Steven Pinker
Pinker was born in Montreal and earned his doctorate in experimental psychology at Harvard in 1979. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1982 until 2003, and later became the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard. His research centers on language and cognition, including visual cognition and how children acquire language. He wrote The Language Instinct, published in 1994. In The Better Angels of Our Nature he makes the case that human societies have become less violent over the long run, and in Enlightenment Now he credits reason, science and humanism with making people's lives better. Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004. He also chaired the American Heritage Dictionary's Usage Panel from 2008 to 2018.