Steven Pinker
Harvard University, Psychology, Faculty Member
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Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, Behavioral Sciences, Anthropology, and 18 moreVision Science, Academic Freedom, Philosophy, War Theory, Human Evolution, Intelligence, Peace and Conflict Studies, Psychology, Engineering, Health Sciences, Languages and Linguistics, Intellectual History, Biological Anthropology, Photography, Memory (Cognitive Psychology), Linguistic Politeness, Open Access Books in Linguistics, and Computer Engineering edit
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I am a cognitive scientist interested in all aspects of language, mind, and human nature. My research has concentrate... moreI am a cognitive scientist interested in all aspects of language, mind, and human nature. My research has concentrated on visual cognition (imagery, attention, shape recognition), psycholinguistics (the acquisition of syntax and morphology, conceptual semantics, regular and irregular phenomena in language), and social relations (indirect speech, common knowledge, cooperation, and social emotions). Since the publication of my book The Better Angels of Our Nature, I have retained an interest in the psychology and history of violence and nonviolence. In 2014 I published The Sense of Style: A Writing Guide for the 20th Century, My most recent book (2018) is called Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. For more information, see www.stevenpinker.com edit
ABSTRACTAcademic writing is notoriously difficult to read. Can political science do better? To assess the state of prose in political science, we examined a recent issue of the American Political Science Review. We evaluated the articles... more
ABSTRACTAcademic writing is notoriously difficult to read. Can political science do better? To assess the state of prose in political science, we examined a recent issue of the American Political Science Review. We evaluated the articles according to the basic principles of style endorsed by writing experts. We find that the writing suffers most from heavy noun phrases in forms such as noun noun noun and adjective adjective noun noun. Further, we describe five contributors that swell noun phrases: piled modifiers, needless words, nebulous nouns, missing prepositions, and buried verbs. We document more than a thousand examples and demonstrate how to revise each one with principles of style. We also draw on research in cognitive science to explain why these constructions confuse, mislead, and distract readers.
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What is universal about music across human societies, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world’s societies and a discography of audio recordings of the music... more
What is universal about music across human societies, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world’s societies and a discography of audio recordings of the music itself. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music appears in every society observed; that variation in musical behavior is well-characterized by three dimensions, which capture the formality, arousal, and religiosity of song events; that musical behavior varies more within societies than across societies on these dimensions; and that music is regularly associated with behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography, analyzed through four representations (machine summaries, listener ratings, expert annotations, expert transcriptions), revealed that identifiable acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral function worldwide, and that these features fall along two dimensions, melodic and rhythmic complex...
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When people speak, they often insinuate their intent indirectly rather than stating it as a bald proposition. Examples include sexual come-ons, veiled threats, polite requests, and concealed bribes. We propose a three-part theory of... more
When people speak, they often insinuate their intent indirectly rather than stating it as a bald proposition. Examples include sexual come-ons, veiled threats, polite requests, and concealed bribes. We propose a three-part theory of indirect speech, based on the idea that human communication involves a mixture of cooperation and conflict. First, indirect requests allow for plausible deniability, in which a cooperative listener can accept the request, but an uncooperative one cannot react adversarially to it. This intuition is supported by a game-theoretic model that predicts the costs and benefits to a speaker of direct and indirect requests. Second, language has two functions: to convey information and to negotiate the type of relationship holding between speaker and hearer (in particular, dominance, communality, or reciprocity). The emotional costs of a mismatch in the assumed relationship type can create a need for plausible deniability and, thereby, select for indirectness even ...
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We identify common genetic variants associated with cognitive performance using a two-stage approach, which we call the proxy-phenotype method. First, we conduct a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in a large sample... more
We identify common genetic variants associated with cognitive performance using a two-stage approach, which we call the proxy-phenotype method. First, we conduct a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in a large sample (n = 106,736), which produces a set of 69 education-associated SNPs. Second, using independent samples (n = 24,189), we measure the association of these education-associated SNPs with cognitive performance. Three SNPs (rs1487441, rs7923609, and rs2721173) are significantly associated with cognitive performance after correction for multiple hypothesis testing. In an independent sample of older Americans (n = 8,652), we also show that a polygenic score derived from the education-associated SNPs is associated with memory and absence of dementia. Convergent evidence from a set of bioinformatics analyses implicates four specific genes (KNCMA1, NRXN1, POU2F3, and SCRT). All of these genes are associated with a particular neurotransmitter pathway involved ...
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Intelligence, Cognition, Statistical Genetics, Behavior Genetics, Biology, and 15 moreQuantitative Genetics, Medicine, Multidisciplinary, Individual Differences, Learning, Memory, Humans, Female, Male, Human Behavioral Genetics, Neuronal Plasticity, Synaptic Transmission, Phenotype, Single Nucleotide Polymorphism, and Academy of Sciences and Letters
Self-deception is a powerful but overapplied theory. It is adaptive only when a deception-detecting audience is in the loop, not when an inaccurate representation is invoked as an internal motivator. First, an inaccurate representation... more
Self-deception is a powerful but overapplied theory. It is adaptive only when a deception-detecting audience is in the loop, not when an inaccurate representation is invoked as an internal motivator. First, an inaccurate representation cannot be equated with self-deception, which entails two representations, one inaccurate and the other accurate. Second, any motivational advantages are best achieved with an adjustment to the decision rule on when to act, not with a systematic error in an internal representation.
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Abstract: Three experiments tested the hypothesis that graphs convey information effectively because they can display global trends as geometric patterns that visual systems encode easily. A novel type of graph was invented in which... more
Abstract: Three experiments tested the hypothesis that graphs convey information effectively because they can display global trends as geometric patterns that visual systems encode easily. A novel type of graph was invented in which angles/lengths of line segments joined end-to-end represented variables of rainfall and temperature of a set of months. It was expected that questions about single values of a variable would be easier to answer when the variable was encoded as a segment length whereas questions about global trends of ...
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Steven Pinker. Department of Psychology. Harvard University (email). Enter your keywords: About; Books; Publications; Research; Lectures; Media; Photos. Obituary: Roger Brown. Citation: Pinker, S. (1998). Obituary: Roger Brown. Cognition.... more
Steven Pinker. Department of Psychology. Harvard University (email). Enter your keywords: About; Books; Publications; Research; Lectures; Media; Photos. Obituary: Roger Brown. Citation: Pinker, S. (1998). Obituary: Roger Brown. Cognition. 66, 199-213. Export. Tagged; XML; BibTex; Google Scholar. Preview, Attachment, Size. PDF, 78.31 KB. Publications By Type. Book (12); Book Chapter (1); Broadcast (1); Conference Paper (1); Conference Proceedings (1); Journal Article (40); Magazine Article (44); Newspaper Article (25); Web Article (3). Publications ...
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Many observers are skeptical of the evidence that war has declined, because they think that a decline in war requires an unrealistic, romantic theory of human nature. In fact it is compatible with a hardheaded view of human violent... more
Many observers are skeptical of the evidence that war has declined, because they think that a decline in war requires an unrealistic, romantic theory of human nature. In fact it is compatible with a hardheaded view of human violent inclinations which is firmly rooted in evolutionary biology. Homo sapiens evolved with violent tendencies, but they are triggered by particular circumstances; they are not a hydraulic urge that must periodically be discharged. And though our species evolved with motives that can erupt in violence, it also evolved motives that can inhibit violence, including self-control, empathy, a sense of fairness, and open-ended cognitive mechanisms that can devise technologies for reducing violence. The Decline of War and Conceptions of Human Nature War appears to be in decline. In the two-thirds of a century since the end of World War II, the great powers, and developed states in general, have rarely faced each other on the battlefield, a historically unprecedented s...
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New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books�����including the... more
New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books�����including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate�����have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today��'s most important and popular science writers. Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words ...
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Most evidence for the role of regular inflection as a default operation comes from languages that confound the morphological properties of regular and irregular forms with their phonological characteristics. For instance, regular plurals... more
Most evidence for the role of regular inflection as a default operation comes from languages that confound the morphological properties of regular and irregular forms with their phonological characteristics. For instance, regular plurals tend to faithfully preserve the base's phonology (e.g., rat-rats), whereas irregular nouns tend to alter it (e.g., mouse-mice). The distinction between regular and irregular inflection may thus
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English speakers disfavor compounds containing regular plurals compared to irregular ones. Haskell, MacDonald and Seidenberg (2003) attribute this phenomenon to the rarity of compounds containing words with the phonological properties of... more
English speakers disfavor compounds containing regular plurals compared to irregular ones. Haskell, MacDonald and Seidenberg (2003) attribute this phenomenon to the rarity of compounds containing words with the phonological properties of regular plurals. Five experiments test this proposal. Experiment 1 demonstrated that novel regular plurals (e.g., loonks-eater) are disliked in compounds compared to irregular plurals with illicit (hence less frequent) phonological patterns (e.g., leevk-eater, plural of loovk). Experiments 2–3 found that people show no dispreference for compounds containing nouns that merely sound like regular plurals (e.g., hose-installer vs. pipe-installer). Experiments 4–5 showed a robust effect of morphological regularity when phonological familiarity was controlled: Compounds containing regular plural nonwords (e.g., gleeks-hunter, plural of gleek) were disfavored relative to irregular, phonologically-identical, plurals (e.g., breex-container, plural of broox)....
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Mathematics, Computer Science, Phonology, Morphology, Linguistics, and 4 moreInflection, Noun, Plural, and Compound
Linguistic and cultural changes are revealed through the analyses of words appearing in books.
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Seeing the Brain's One, Two, Three Taking advantage of the rare opportunity to record neuronal activity in the human brain using intracranial electrodes, Sahin et al. (p. 445 ; see the Perspective by Hagoort and Levelt ) document the... more
Seeing the Brain's One, Two, Three Taking advantage of the rare opportunity to record neuronal activity in the human brain using intracranial electrodes, Sahin et al. (p. 445 ; see the Perspective by Hagoort and Levelt ) document the spatial and temporal pattern of neuronal populations within Broca's area as patients thought of a single word, changed its tense (for verbs) or number (for nouns), and articulated the word silently. For these three stages, they detected activity at 200, 320, and 450 milliseconds, moving in a caudal to rostral direction. These data fit neatly within the roughly 600 milliseconds required for the onset of speech and map the distinct neural computations within an area of the brain, known for almost a century and a half, as important for the production of language.
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Although Darwin insisted that human intelligence could be fully explained by the theory of evolution, the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, claimed that abstract intelligence was of no use to ancestral humans and... more
Although Darwin insisted that human intelligence could be fully explained by the theory of evolution, the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, claimed that abstract intelligence was of no use to ancestral humans and could only be explained by intelligent design. Wallace's apparent paradox can be dissolved with two hypotheses about human cognition. One is that intelligence is an adaptation to a knowledge-using, socially interdependent lifestyle, the “cognitive niche.” This embraces the ability to overcome the evolutionary fixed defenses of plants and animals by applications of reasoning, including weapons, traps, coordinated driving of game, and detoxification of plants. Such reasoning exploits intuitive theories about different aspects of the world, such as objects, forces, paths, places, states, substances, and other people's beliefs and desires. The theory explains many zoologically unusual traits inHomo sapiens, including our complex toolkit, wide ran...
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Game Theory, Biology, Language, Medicine, Multidisciplinary, and 3 moreNature, Natural Selection, and Humans
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Though Broca's Area has long been implicated in grammatical computation, neither aphasiological nor neuroimaging studies have confirmed such a connection, because syntactic processing is often confounded with working memory,... more
Though Broca's Area has long been implicated in grammatical computation, neither aphasiological nor neuroimaging studies have confirmed such a connection, because syntactic processing is often confounded with working memory, articulation, or semantic selection. Inflectional morphology (grammatical combination inside the word) offers potentially simpler paradigms. We asked 18 subjects to inflect words silently in the past tense or plural, or to read them verbatim (tasks with minimal demands on working ...
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Regular and irregular inflections have become an important tool for understanding mechanisms underlying human language and cognition. Regular-irregular homophones such as rang the bell/ringed the city challenge connectionist models in... more
Regular and irregular inflections have become an important tool for understanding mechanisms underlying human language and cognition. Regular-irregular homophones such as rang the bell/ringed the city challenge connectionist models in which phonological information is the only input to the inflection process. Models of language that differentiate between lexicon and grammar attribute these inflectional differences to distinct lexical or morphological representations while connectionist models distinguish them by semantic ...
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Six e~ periments test the hypothesis that children make use of the linking regularity, but that they must learn whal counts as affected in the meanings of particular verbs, From this proposal it follows that chil~ en will be productive~... more
Six e~ periments test the hypothesis that children make use of the linking regularity, but that they must learn whal counts as affected in the meanings of particular verbs, From this proposal it follows that chil~ en will be productive~ producing forms they haven't heard in the input..,-and in fact, before they figure out what counts as affected they may overgenerate locative forms (ie, produce ungrammatical sentences). Furthermore~ it is predicted that instances of overgeneration should be associated with corresponding misinterpretations ...
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Significance Humans are an unusually cooperative species, and our cooperation is of 2 kinds: altruistic, when actors benefit others at a cost to themselves, and mutualistic, when actors benefit themselves and others simultaneously. One... more
Significance Humans are an unusually cooperative species, and our cooperation is of 2 kinds: altruistic, when actors benefit others at a cost to themselves, and mutualistic, when actors benefit themselves and others simultaneously. One major form of mutualism is coordination, in which actors align their choices for mutual benefit. Formal examples include meetings, division of labor, and legal and technological standards; informal examples include friendships, authority hierarchies, alliances, and exchange partnerships. Successful coordination is enabled by common knowledge: knowledge of others’ knowledge, knowledge of their knowledge of one’s knowledge, ad infinitum. Uncovering how people acquire and represent the common knowledge needed for coordination is thus essential to understanding human sociality, from large-scale institutions to everyday experiences of civility, hypocrisy, outrage, and taboo.
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What is the relationship between the language people use to describe an event and their moral judgments? We test the hypothesis that moral judgment and causative verbs rely on the same underlying mental model of people's actions.... more
What is the relationship between the language people use to describe an event and their moral judgments? We test the hypothesis that moral judgment and causative verbs rely on the same underlying mental model of people's actions. Experiment 1a finds that participants choose different verbs to describe the major variants of a moral dilemma, the trolley problem, mirroring differences in their wrongness judgments: they described direct harm with a single causative verb (Adam killed the man), and indirect harm with an intransitive verb in a periphrastic construction (Adam caused the man to die). Experiments 1b and 2 separate physical causality from moral valuation by varying whether the victim is a person or animal and whether the harmful action rescues people or inanimate objects. The results show that people's moral judgments lead them to portray a causal event as either more or less direct and intended, which in turn shapes their verb choices. Experiment 3 finds the same basi...
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Does knowledge of language consist of mentally-represented rules? Rumelhart and McClelland havedescribed a connectionist (parallel distributed processing) model of the acquisition of the past tense inEnglish which successfully maps many... more
Does knowledge of language consist of mentally-represented rules? Rumelhart and McClelland havedescribed a connectionist (parallel distributed processing) model of the acquisition of the past tense inEnglish which successfully maps many stems onto their past tense forms, both regular (walk/walked) andirregular (go/went), and which mimics some of the errors and sequences of development of children. Yetthe model contains no explicit rules, only a set of neuron-style units which stand for trigrams of phoneticfeatures of the ...
Research on human cooperation has concentrated on the puzzle of altruism, in which 1 actor incurs a cost to benefit another, and the psychology of reciprocity, which evolved to solve this problem. We examine the complementary puzzle of... more
Research on human cooperation has concentrated on the puzzle of altruism, in which 1 actor incurs a cost to benefit another, and the psychology of reciprocity, which evolved to solve this problem. We examine the complementary puzzle of mutualism, in which actors can benefit each other simultaneously, and the psychology of coordination, which ensures such benefits. Coordination is facilitated by common knowledge: the recursive belief state in which A knows X, B knows X, A knows that B knows X, B knows that A knows X, ad infinitum. We test whether people are sensitive to common knowledge when deciding whether to engage in risky coordination. Participants decided between working alone for a certain profit and working together for a potentially higher profit that they would receive only if their partner made the same choice. Results showed that more participants attempted risky coordination when they and their prospective partner had common knowledge of the payoffs (broadcast over a lou...
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The more potential helpers there are, the less likely any individual is to help. A traditional explanation for this bystander effect is that responsibility diffuses across the multiple bystanders, diluting the responsibility of each. We... more
The more potential helpers there are, the less likely any individual is to help. A traditional explanation for this bystander effect is that responsibility diffuses across the multiple bystanders, diluting the responsibility of each. We investigate an alternative, which combines the volunteer's dilemma (each bystander is best off if another responds) with recursive theory of mind (each infers what the others know about what he knows) to predict that actors will strategically shirk when they think others feel compelled to help. In 3 experiments, participants responded to a (fictional) person who needed help from at least 1 volunteer. Participants were in groups of 2 or 5 and had varying information about whether other group members knew that help was needed. As predicted, people's decision to help zigzagged with the depth of their asymmetric, recursive knowledge (e.g., "John knows that Michael knows that John knows help is needed"), and replicated the classic bystan...
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This article is a tutorial overview of a sample of central issues in visual cognition, focusing on the recognition of shapes and the representation of objects and spatial relations in perception and imagery. Brief reviews of the state of... more
This article is a tutorial overview of a sample of central issues in visual cognition, focusing on the recognition of shapes and the representation of objects and spatial relations in perception and imagery. Brief reviews of the state of the art are presented, followed by more extensive presentations of contemporary theories, findings, and open issues. I discuss various theories of shape recognition, such as template, feature, Fourier, structural description, Marr-Nishihara, and massively parallel models, and issues such as the ...