Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker (Montreal, Canada, 1954), with dual Canadian-U.S. citizenship, earned a BA in Psychology from McGill University (1976) and a PhD in the same subject from Harvard University (1979). After two decades of teaching and research at Harvard, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2003 he returned to Harvard, where he is currently Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology. He has authored twelve books, many of them award-winning, of which the most recent is Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (2021), while the earlier Language, Cognition, and Human Nature (2013) presents a selection of his scholarly articles. A former Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, his editorial service also includes a time as Executive Associate Editor of Cognition: International Journal of Cognitive Science. Pinker serves on the Global Welfare Panel of the London School of Economics and the Barcelona School of Economics and has received honorary doctorates from nine universities in five countries. In 2021, the website Academic Influence ranked him the second most influential psychologist in the world in the decade 2010-2020.

“Steven Pinker” – the committee says – “has combined outstanding achievements in evolutionary cognitive psychology with highly insightful analyses of the conditions of human progress. He depicts such progress from an optimistic perspective grounded in reason, science and humanism.”

For Pinker’s nominator José Muñiz, Professor of Psychometry and Rector at Nebrija University, “his great success has been to take a step beyond his robust academic work and more technical publications on language and bring his analysis to bear on more transcendental and cross-cutting issues which he addresses in landmark publications on rationality and the Enlightenment, explaining them in plain terms that make them accessible to a wide public.”

“The awardee,” he adds, “has his base in evolutionary psychology, which studies how what it is to be human has changed over time according to the demands of evolution, and rationality has not always been part of that story. But Pinker has explained very well that it is precisely rationality that has made us progress as a species, seeking the solution to challenges in scientific knowledge.”

“Rationality grounded in scientific knowledge is, in his view, our most powerful means to pursue the truth, avoiding the traps of cognitive miserliness and unconscious bias described by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor (winners of the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Sciences in 2020). Pinker is a perfect fit for this award because he is a humanist who can bring together science and culture, and indeed warned in a recent article: ‘Dear Humanists, Science is not your enemy’.”

From news to data, the power of rationality

Most people, Steven Pinker points out, construct their view of reality from the news stories that the media bombard them with on a daily basis – generally a succession of crimes, wars and other disasters. Yet the Professor of Psychology at Harvard University has devoted much of his work to showing how this distorts our perception of the world and of our capacities as human beings.

“The news is systematically misleading,” he says, “because it is a non-random sample of the worst things that happen anywhere on Earth on a given day. It feeds into our availability bias, namely, whatever is easily available to our mind we think is common or prevalent. So as we read about terrorist attacks and famine and wars, we think they are increasing. But if you switch your view of the world from news to data, you discover that the state of things is a lot better than you thought.”

In contrast to the doom-laden vision that, he says, predominates not just in the media but also in many academic circles, Pinker has long defended ­– and documented – the power of rationality as the primary driver of society’s material and moral progress. “The good things,” he explains, “tend to build up gradually, like the fact that every day another 137,000 people escape from extreme poverty. And there are also things that don’t happen, like regions of the world that have not had a war, that are missed by the news but are visible with data.”

Human nature, a unique biological inheritance compatible with progress

Pinker began his career in experimental cognitive psychology, studying how children acquire language, humanity’s most distinctive faculty. Inspired in part by Noam Chomsky, 2019 Frontiers of Knowledge laureate in the Humanities, he argued in his 1994 book The Language Instinct that “this human ability is a product of natural selection, a Darwinian adaptation for communication and sociality.”

Some time later, concerned about the tendency in humanities and social science research to deny the existence of human nature, seeing the mind as an empty vessel to be filled by society and culture, Pinker argued in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002) that we are in fact born with a biological programming that at least partly conditions our behavior, predisposing us to act in determined ways. Without denying or skating over the dark side of human nature, he chose to stress that we have unusual biological abilities, starting with language and rationality, that are particularly conducive to progress, along with our ample capacity for empathy not just with family but also with unrelated individuals.

“People mistakenly think that if we were blank slates, there would be more hope for human improvement, for it would mean we do not inherit aggressive, ugly or selfish motives from evolution. People could be programmed to be cooperative or peaceful. I argue against that equation, saying that human nature is complex but has other capacities that are compatible with progress.”

Pinker admits that we have “some ugly motives that have been programmed in by natural selection: dominance and revenge, the capacity to be callous toward others, the capacity for sadism.” But we also have “a capacity for rationality,” he affirms, even though “nature gave us only the rudiments or seeds” which we must learn to cultivate. In his view, what drives progress is the development of ideals, values and institutions that “enhance our reasoning” and give us the capacity to “inhibit or repress some of our darker instincts.”

A plea in defense of Enlightenment ideals, values and institutions

In his last three books – all of them internationally acclaimed – Pinker makes a powerful plea in favor of rationality as the motor force of progress, documenting the advances made over past centuries in all major indicators of human wellbeing.

For the awardee psychologist, “we have always had capacities toward empathy, peace and cooperation, as well as violence, exploitation and cruelty.” However, the ideals, values and institutions of the Enlightenment, defined by Pinker as “the application of reason to human betterment, by means of scientifically validated knowledge,” have lent wings to “the better angels of our nature,” a quote from Abraham Lincoln that gave title to the 2017 book where he documents the significant decline in wars, assassinations and deaths from other forms of violence through world history.

When Pinker talks about the “enlightened institutions” that bring out the best in human nature he is referring to democratic governments with separation of powers, the rule of law, the universities, hospitals, research organizations and scientific societies that generate and disseminate validated knowledge, a free press that can denounce misuses of power, and international political institutions like the UN or European Union that promote worldwide cooperation. “These are the institutions that make us smarter collectively than any of us is individually, but also set out the incentives for cooperation, with each of us making a small sacrifice in our own freedom to achieve greater benefits for all.”

Progress, a “real and measurable” good

One year after the success of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Pinker published Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress (2018), in which he extended his analysis of the decline of violence to all other main indicators of global welfare: from lower child mortality and longer lifespan to the reduction of deaths from starvation, natural disasters or occupational accidents, the decline in extreme poverty, improvement in literacy, the growing number of countries with democratic governments, etc.

“Although I’m often called an optimist, in truth human progress is not just an aspiration. It’s not just a matter of seeing the glass as half full. Not that a researcher’s temperament would ever be a sound reason to believe what they say. What I have tried to show is that progress is something real and measurable that is clearly evidenced by the main historical trends regarding the human condition,” Pinker explains. “But progress is not a force of nature, it is something that came about thanks to the core ideals of the Enlightenment, with their focus on using knowledge to improve human wellbeing through science.”

Finally, in his latest book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why it Matters (2021), Pinker sets out “the major tools of rationality that we are not born with but that we have to learn and cultivate.” These include tools like logic and probability theory, which “every educated person should understand but no book had explained all together for the general reader.”

Rationality, he says, matters not only because “it helps us make better decisions in our personal lives,” but because “it drives moral progress at the societal level,” as we can see from such milestones as the abolition of slavery or advances in the rights of women and homosexuals. One conclusion Pinker shares unreservedly with co-laureate Peter Singer: “I believe my work fits with his idea of the ‘expanding circle’, which for me was a major inspiration. The data I present in my books shows that our concern for others has expanded to all humanity, and I fully agree that we should continue extending it to all sentient beings.”

Pinker admits that we now face formidable global challenges, like climate change and the geopolitical tensions unlocked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but insists that they give no cause to doubt progress, but rather to go on confidently applying the ideals, values and institutions of the Enlightenment. “Is progress inevitable? Of course not. Progress does not mean that everything becomes better for everyone everywhere all the time. That would be a miracle, and progress is not a miracle but problem-solving. Problems are inevitable and solutions create new problems which have to be solved in their turn. The unsolved problems facing the world today are gargantuan, but we must see them as problems to be solved, not apocalypses in waiting. When we apply knowledge to improve the human condition, sometimes we can succeed. If we remember what works and we try not to repeat our mistakes, progress can happen.”