Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur "Steve" Pinkeris a Canadian-born American cognitive scientist, psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth18 September 1954
CountryCanada
prayer believe thinking
A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say, 'Nothing has gone wrong yet' without looking for wood to knock?
mean simple hypocrisy
When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.
emotional political mind
Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?
violence world violent
We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.
paris turns related
Paris Hilton, it turns out, is related to fellow celebrity jailbirds Zsa Zsa Gabor and G. Gordon Liddy.
track people doe
People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.
violent states
Pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.
book thinking trends
Students do everything on laptops these days, so I definitely think electronic books are a trend that's going to expand.
technology humanity violence
Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with.
impact mind scales
The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high.
brain mind bags
The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind.
culture doe acquire
There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.
country war today
Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.
sound creatures visuals
We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade.