Steven Pinker

Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. 

Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, Enlightenment Now, and Rationality. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He was Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. 

His thirteenth book, to be published in September 2025, is called When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.

Before taking his current position at Harvard, Steve was an assistant professor at Harvard and Stanford for a year apiece in the early 80s, and then a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT from 1982 to 2003. 

WEBSITE:
www.stevenpinker.com

HIGHLIGHTS:
Guest essay in the New York Times: “Harvard Derangement Syndrome.”