Steven Pinker

Atheist, Educator/Teacher, Jewish, Photographer, Scientist, Writer/Editor

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, and The Sense of Style. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications.

Understanding human nature and exploring its implications.

The ideals of the Enlightenment: Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

My 2007 TED talk on the historical decline of violence changed my life: it turned into my 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, and inspired my 2018 book Enlightenment Now.