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
decades
The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years.
avoiding errors genius kinds language master obeying respecting rules
The three-year-old, then, is a grammatical genius - master of most constructions, obeying rules farmore often than flouting them, respecting language universals, erring in sensible, adultlike ways, and avoiding many kinds of errors altogether.
learned projects quicker
I learned to focus my energy on high-quality, long-term projects rather than lower-quality projects with quicker payoffs.
children invent language thrown
Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other.
obsessions reflects
I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.
applying aspects behavior charged family mindset psychology taking
Evolutionary psychology is taking that mindset and applying it to more emotionally charged aspects of behavior, such as sexuality, violence, beauty, and family feelings.
affected conflict equally life theories wisdom
Intellectual life was enormously affected by an understandable revulsion to Nazism, with its pseudoscientific theories of race, and its equally nonsensical glorification of conflict as part of the evolutionary wisdom of nature.
argue feelings hurt hurts question somebody university
Even if he does occasionally hurt people's feelings -- he occasionally hurts my feelings -- but I'm a big boy. I can get over it. I can argue back. We really need somebody to question the way a university is run.
agenda behavior blank century doctrine explain few mechanisms past psychology sciences simple slate social sought
During the past century the doctrine of the blank slate has set the agenda for much of the social sciences and humanities, ... ... Psychology has sought to explain all thought, feeling, and behavior with a few simple mechanisms of learning.
question
That isn't really a question that can be answered.
people similar street
no more similar than two people plucked off the street at random.
certain common however human might people virtue
It's also a recognition that however much people might vary, they have certain things in common by virtue of their common human nature.
human human-nature theory
All of us have a theory about human nature.
activity result
All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.