Steven Pinker

About

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist interested in all aspects of language, mind, and human nature. He conducts research on a variety of topics in psychology and cognitive science, including common knowledge (things that everyone knows everyone knows), language acquisition, emotion, the moral sense, rationality, and trends in violence.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Environmental ethics
• Social psychology
• Ecology
• Computer Science
• Law
• Epistemology
• Economics

Selected publications

• Universality and diversity in human song

  Science · 2019-11-22 · 587 citations

  articleOpen access

  What is universal about music, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world's societies, as well as a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music (including songs with words) appears in every society observed; that music varies along three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity), more within societies than across them; and that music is associated with certain behavioral contexts such as…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The pandemic exposes human nature: 10 evolutionary insights

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 110 citations

  Humans and viruses have been coevolving for millennia. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19) has been particularly successful in evading our evolved defenses. The outcome has been tragic-across the globe, millions have been sickened and hundreds of thousands have died. Moreover, the quarantine has radically changed the structure of our lives, with devastating social and economic consequences that are likely to unfold for years. An evolutiona…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2023 · 96 citations

  Science is among humanity's greatest achievements, yet scientific censorship is rarely studied empirically. We explore the social, psychological, and institutional causes and consequences of scientific censorship (defined as actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific quality). Popular narratives suggest that scientific censorship is driven by authoritarian officials with dark motives, such as dogmatism and intolerance.…

  PublisherDOI

• Common knowledge, coordination, and strategic mentalizing in human social life

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2019-06-28 · 91 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  People often coordinate for mutual gain, such as keeping to opposite sides of a stairway, dubbing an object or place with a name, or assembling en masse to protest a regime. Because successful coordination requires complementary choices, these opportunities raise the puzzle of how people attain the common knowledge that facilitates coordination, in which a person knows X, knows that the other knows X, knows that the other knows that he knows, ad infinitum. We show that people are highly sensitiv…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sex and drugs and rock and roll

  Behavioral and Brain Sciences · 2021-01-01 · 19 citations

  letter1st authorCorresponding

  This article is extraordinarily rigorous and rich, although there are reasons to be skeptical of its theory that music originated to signal group quality and infant solicitude. These include the lack of any signature of the centrality of these functions in the distribution or experience of music; of a role for the pleasure taken in music; and of its connections with language.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01HD018381

  NIH · $4.0M · 2008

• NIH Grant T32MH018823

  NIH · $1.4M · 2003

Frequent coauthors

• Paula Griffiths

  Loughborough University

  121 shared

• Peter Lloyd

  121 shared

• John Gilbert

  University of British Columbia

  121 shared

• Robert B. Stevenson

  121 shared

• Edith L. Bavin

  La Trobe University

  121 shared

• Elaine Clark

  121 shared

• Paul Fletcher

  Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

  121 shared

• San Diego

  Walter de Gruyter (Germany)

  121 shared

Education

• B.A., Psychology

  Stanford University

  1975

• Ph.D., Psychology

  MIT

  1981

Awards & honors

• BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award
• Richard Hanania Prize for Excellence in Science Writing

Similar researchers at Harvard University

• Randy L. Bucknerh-268
• Daniel L. Schacterh-181
• Matthew K. Nockh-126