Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker was born on 18 September 1954 in Montreal, Quebec, into an English-speaking, secular Jewish, upper-middle-class family. His grandparents had immigrated to Canada from Poland and Romania in 1926 and ran a small Montreal necktie factory. His father Harry worked in real estate and was a lawyer; his mother Roslyn was a homemaker before becoming a guidance counsellor and high-school vice-principal. Pinker adopted atheism at thirteen and has variously identified as a cultural Jew. He has said he was an anarchist as a boy until witnessing a 1969 Montreal police strike. He graduated from Dawson College in 1971, took a BA in psychology from McGill in 1976, and a PhD in experimental psychology from Harvard in 1979 under Stephen Kosslyn. After a year at MIT and faculty stints at Harvard and Stanford, he taught at the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences from 1982 to 2003, and served as director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (1994-1999). Since 2003 he has held the Johnstone Family Professorship of Psychology at Harvard.

Pinker's early research with Kosslyn argued that mental images correspond to David Marr's two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch, used in attention and asymmetric-object recognition. In psycholinguistics he developed a computational theory of how children acquire grammatical structures, articulated in Language Learnability and Language Development (1984) and Learnability and Cognition (1989). His 1988 critique with Alan Prince of connectionist models of past-tense acquisition launched a long research program on the regular-irregular verb distinction, summarized in Words and Rules (1999). The 1990 paper with Paul Bloom, Natural Language and Natural Selection, argued that the human language faculty must have evolved by Darwinian natural selection, against the Chomsky-Gould view that language appeared as an evolutionary accident — and is credited with shifting the central question of language evolution from "did it evolve?" to "how did it evolve?"

For the general public, The Language Instinct (1994) brought this view to a wide audience, casting language as a biological adaptation comparable to a spider's web or a beaver's dam. How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002) followed, defending an adaptationist, computational theory of mind in alliance with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. Both books were Pulitzer Prize finalists. The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) made his biggest leap, arguing from large historical data that violence — tribal warfare, homicide, cruel punishment, child abuse, interstate war — has declined across long time scales, propelled by six historical forces including state formation, commerce, feminization, cosmopolitanism, rights revolutions, and reason. Enlightenment Now (2018) extended the argument to a defense of the four Enlightenment values of reason, science, humanism, and progress. Bill Gates publicly called it his favorite book. Pinker was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in 2004, of Foreign Policy's 100 top global thinkers in multiple years, and of Prospect's top ten world thinkers in 2013. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016 and received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (Humanities and Social Sciences) in 2022.

He has paid a steady cost in controversy. Archaeologist David Wengrow described Better Angels as a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along, and the Graeber-Wengrow book The Dawn of Everything (2021) contested its premises in detail. In 2006 Pinker provided his Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz with an interpretation of a federal statute on enticing minors into illegal sex acts via the internet, which Dershowitz used in a letter to the court during the proceedings that ended in Jeffrey Epstein's 2008 plea deal. In 2019 Pinker said he had no knowledge of the nature of the charges, that the favor had been unpaid, and that he regretted writing the letter. His 2005 defense of Harvard President Lawrence Summers's remarks on gender differences in mathematical ability, his debate with Elizabeth Spelke on gender and science, and his arguments about biological differences in average temperaments and talents have made him a recurring target of contemporary gender-essentialism critiques. In July 2020 hundreds of academics signed a Linguistic Society of America open letter calling for his removal from its list of fellows and media experts, citing six of his tweets. The LSA Executive Committee declined and stated that it is not the mission of the Society to control the opinions of its members. In December 2024 Pinker resigned from the honorary board of the Freedom from Religion Foundation after it retracted an anti-transgender article by Jerry Coyne; Coyne and Dawkins resigned in turn, and the foundation dissolved its honorary board. In May 2025 he published a New York Times guest essay, Harvard Derangement Syndrome, attacking the Trump administration's halt of Harvard's ability to enroll international students. His most recent book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… (2025), extends his game-theoretic interests to common knowledge as the substrate of social coordination and money. He remains, into his seventies, one of the most controversial living public intellectuals.